Community programs often go hand-in-hand with oil development. A new project in northwestern India is no exception.
Rajasthan, home to exciting oil discoveries in the last several years, is also one of India’s poorest states. Dry, hot conditions in the Thar Desert stymie agricultural projects, and the state subsists predominantly on tourism.
Life in the desert is a perpetual struggle. Women and girls spend up to 80% of their time carrying water 10-15 km to their family’s village, or dhani. The drudgery leaves little time for education. The high opportunity cost of gathering water contributes to illiteracy and locks families in a vicious cycle of deprivation.
Enter a wee Scottish exploration company.
Edinburgh-based Cairn Energy PLC works a vast license area east of the district seat of Barmer. Cairn staff began to recognize that limited access to water was a major difficulty in the villages.
Wells
After drilling dozens of exploration wells, Cairn mapped an extensive Tertiary aquifer at 200-400 m below the surface, but the water was unfortunately brackish. Cairn considered building a desalination plant but noted a United Nations charter stipulates that a country’s water supply is a responsibility of the government and was not a sustainable project.
Local people dig simple utilitarian water wells by hand. Cairn geophysical advisor Peter Stacey recently kept tabs on the progress of a deep well, a few meters in diameter. As the well progressed (with simple hand tools), the builder would plaster the sides with cement, to stabilize the walls.
Elsewhere in Rajasthan and neighboring Gujarat, closer to large population centers, are decorative Johara or Jhalara wells, large, rectangular masonry-lined pits with sloping bottoms, which are filled during monsoon rains or by subterranean seepage. Some have ramped access for livestock, a great deal fancier and older than cattle tanks dug on ranches in the US.
In Gujarat state, you find old stepwells (vav or vavadi), some 1,000 years old, dug to the water table and lined with bricks in an X-pattern, allowing people to step down to collect water. In Rajasthan these are called baolis or bavadis.
Water harvesting
Monsoon rain falls along the southern margin of the Thar Desert. The area has limited vegetation between the sand dunes, predominantly acacia trees and grasses, although Cairn has planted 6,000 Neem trees along the dusty roads. Living safely among so many vegetarians, the local wildlife (camels, goats, deer, antelope, peacocks, parrots) abounds.
Collecting the seasonal rain in holding basins is a practical solution. Diggis are circular underground water tanks with impermeable liners of zinc, plastic, or concrete.
Kunds, or kundis, and tankas are similar underground tanks, with saucer-like catchment areas at ground level and large dome-shaped lids, perhaps 3-8 m across. The water inlets are covered with a wire mesh to keep debris out of the tank.
Having a diggi, kundi, or tanka is usually limited to those with money and land for the construction.
Cairn has enlisted the help of SURE (Society for the Uplifting of Rural Economics), a local nongovernmental organization that identifies locals who are in particular need of a closer water source. Cairn is sponsoring 300 tankas in 2005-06.
In mid-November, a group of journalists visited a new water tank in Sindhari village, amid mud huts with thatched roofs, near the Saraswati-3 wellsite. The 10-ft diameter, 12-ft deep cistern was surrounded by a concrete catchment area and had a flat, rather than domed, top. It cost 14,000 rupees (about $300) to build at the homestead of an elderly and widowed mother and daughter. Local villagers were hired for the construction.
Canals
Many Rajasthanis depend on canal water, but canals are expensive, inefficient (wasting water through evaporation and seepage), insufficient (failing to deliver enough), and unhealthy (delivering poor-quality water and water-borne diseases).
Water is becoming scarce throughout India, fomenting a potential crisis as overuse of groundwater pushes the water table ever deeper and battles develop between states and countries over riparian rights.
Earlier this year, the Punjabi government changed long-standing conventions by unilaterally restricting water from the Ravi-Beas River, which normally flows into Rajasthan and Haryana. The public investment in canal infrastructure is wasted without the planned water supply from the Punjab.
Better to reexamine traditional rainwater-harvesting techniques to decrease dependence on the canals and improve life across the Thar.✦
