Way up in the giddy reaches of Ladakh, pastoralists and agriculturalists are dependent on two major sources of water: snow melt in spring followed by glacier melt in summer. Winter in Ladakh ranges from November to December, when snow piles up and gradually melts as spring approaches, feeding the numerous springs that run down the mountain. They are soon done, and now, as spring moves into summer, melting glaciers fill in the gap – keeping the valleys green and fertile for barley, wheat and peas, and the grass fresh for sheep and goats famous for their soft pashmina wool.
Climate change has played havoc with this finely tuned supply. Ladakh has seen repeated flash floods in 2010, 2012, 2015 and 2018, and snowfall has been erratic. That meant that snowmelt could no longer be depended on to supply the streams in spring. Further, a rise of 1 degree Celsius, meant that the glaciers disappeared from some ranges or, worse, moved higher up the ranges, melting later. Net result: a dry period in the valleys below for a crucial month; enough to make agriculture and pastoralism unviable as the grasslands dried up.
Into the breach stepped Sonam Wangchuk, environmentalist, engineer, innovator working at the ‘grassroots’ and founder member of SEMCOL (Students Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh) with a view to improve the educational system in the union territory.
While crossing a bridge, sometime in the summer of 2013, he noticed a mound of ice sheltering under a bridge. His mind went into overdrive and he wondered whether a large ice ‘stupa’ that melted slowly in summer would provide the answer. A stupa is cone-shaped, with a broad base and tapering top, and has the least surface area exposed to the sun.
So on an icy winter night in Leh, with temperatures bottoming out at minus 30 degree Celsius, he shot up a jet of water – harvested from a mountain stream, through a long narrow pipe with a fine nozzle at its end. As the water sprayed out, it froze around the pipe and hey presto, formed an ice stupa around it. The first prototype was 6 feet high and held 1,50,000 litres of slow-melting water. This, Wangchuck knew, could only have to get bigger and better and it did. By 2015, he built a stupa with a capacity of 1.5 million litres of water. The bigger ambition behind this was to create a stupa large enough to be self-sustaining, even leading to the formation of artificial glaciers. A stupa, say with a base of 10 meters, would lose perhaps 5 meters, during summer. But in the following winter it might well gain 10 meters as the falling snow froze into ice on its surface as it fell, now making it 15 meters tall. Another solution to the unreliability of snowfall, was to create stupas at various heights along the mountain sides, which would melt turn by turn, the ones lower down melting sooner than those higher up, thus providing a constant supply of melt-water.
The idea caught on, with ice stupas coming up everywhere. For this achievement, Wangchuck was awarded the Rolex prize and the renowned Magsaysay Award among others. And this is the same man that the government incarcerated under the NSA in 2025, for seeking more autonomy for the Ladakhi people.
Wangchuk knows well that his ‘ice stupa’ solution is a local solution for a local problem. Ladakhis have the tiniest eco-footprint possible and the cause for climate change and global warming lies elsewhere – in our big cities, wholesale deforestation, vast reckless mining, spewing of poisonous gases, the turning of our rivers into toxic sewers and an utterly wasteful lifestyle.
And to tackle these issues, we need educated young people, who have the energy, inspiration and willingness to try new ideas. Which, we have – many of them in institutes around the country – but often whose ideas are shut down by those big daddies, whose toes they may tread on and profit margins dent. Wherever you turn, there are pristine forests doomed to destruction along with the locals who have lived in peace with them for aeons, just so some fat industrialist can pillage the land further.
Wangchuk’s solution should provide inspiration and an example for the rest of the country. We are vast and multihued, with each area having its own unique set of issues and problems, each of which, perhaps, needs a Sonam Wangchuk in their midst to provide a localised solution. We are not a ‘one size fits all’ country. And that ‘light bulb’ moment can only happen if youngsters are given a good imaginative education (and are not driven to hanging themselves) by the system. The ruling dispensation knows that only too well, which is why they shoo off their own progeny to universities abroad. (It ought to be mandatory that the offspring of all those in power are educated in government schools and institutes in the country.) And those poor wretches that stick it out here, only find that it is rotten within, eaten away by a pus-filled infection – and that they have been done in.
An idea is usually born when two incongruous concepts are brought together by a bright mind that asks, ‘But what if…?’ So many of our brilliant discoveries have happened this way: the discovery of penicillin is among the most famous. What if Alexander Fleming had ignored the rogue mold that had destroyed bacteria in its petri dish instead of thinking, ‘Hey, what if this could work to kill harmful bacteria?’
What is amazing is that in spite of the system, we still produce indefatigable people like Sonam Wangchuk.
Ice Stupa in Ladakh (Wikimedia Commons) 
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