Bhagirath didn’t have an engineering degree

The village leaders brought out two very large scale maps of the region. This showed the villages, contours of the land, where forests existed and where they did not, land under agriculture, existing structures, buildings and water courses.

The maps were spread on the floor of the shamiana under which the meeting was happening. They plotted their own villages or homesteads on the map. They had a visual map of the area; this was transposed onto the butterpaper map. They quickly added in geographical features not on the map like ravines across on which a checkdam could be built.

For instance, Taima Ramji from Baucchi village asks, ‘‘Where is my village?’’ Another person traces his finger over the map and jabs a spot that has Baucchi written in Hindi. After that, its easy for Taima to understand the topography of the area, as depicted by the map, and decide where a check dam should come up. He and another man from the village debate the pros and cons of the location and, realising that somebody’s house will be flooded, shift the location a few metres upstream. The person’s house is now a few metres downstream from the checkdam and will be one of the first to benefit from it. Next steps — a verbal plan that includes survey timelines, who will participate from the village in the construction and talking to TBS people about funding, labour and materials. A project usually sees the villagers chipping in with labour, all of it, and TBS providing the building material and any expert advice.

Not one of the people in the 150-strong gathering is a qualified engineer. A few have been to college; most have studied up to Class VIII and hardly anybody understands English. It is this group of villagers, and thousands of others like them, who have taken their water resources in hand and in the process, managed to chart a new future for themselves. Rajender Singh, chairman of the TBS, says they understand that government water supply schemes have failed to deliver over the past few decades. On the contrary, the water table has fallen owing to the government’s tubewells dug to provide irrigation water. The forests have disappeared thanks to the forest department’s focus on making money, white and black, from the wood.

The biggest difference between what the local people do, and what the government has done, for water supply, is that the work done by local people is community-owned, therefore sustainable. The structures are inexpensive and can be looked after without any outside help at low cost. Government schemes are regarded as alien and maintenance is ‘‘somebody else’s headache’’. Once people build a structure, there is no running cost to get water. Government schemes entail regular payments — for electricity and diesel for pumpsets or water charges for piped water. ‘‘Which would your choose?’’ asks a person from another village, Babulal Gujjar.

The writer is a communication analyst