Rajasthan’s Water Warriors: Restoring Traditional Earthen Dams for Rainwater Harvesting and Groundwater Replenishment

~ Amanda Suutari, Gerry Marten, Steve Brooks

Site visit assistance and editorial contributions: Ann Marten

This in-depth ETP story features a Photogallery.

This article is based on detailed documentation by Amanda Suutari during two site visits to Rajasthan. Click here to see the complete source document, including quotes from interviews.

The wells in Rajasthan’s Alwar District had dried up, thrusting the people into abject and seemingly inescapable poverty. The revival of traditional earthen dams to capture rainwater for recharging the underground water supply provided a tipping point that brought the wells back to life. And with the water came a better life for the people. It started in the spare, humble village of Gopalpura. Nearly a thousand villages are now following Gopalpura’s example.

On the surface, the Indian village of Gopalpura looks little different from the way it did the day a young Rajendra Singh arrived, back in 1985. Only 120 miles but a world away from the clamor and chaos of New Delhi, it’s still a dusty hamlet, where older dwellings are built of mud bricks and newer ones of cinderblocks. Women in worn but colorful saris walk the dirt paths, balancing clay pots on their heads as they approach the village water pump.

But an Indian Rip Van Winkle, as he awakened after twenty years, would notice some important changes. Scattered around the village and its borders are patches of green, of trees and fields, a break from the monotonous scrub that dominates the northeast corner of Rajasthan. He’d see the women chatting by the well and wonder how they managed to have any time to relax.

Then his eyes would fix upon the well. The water pouring from the pump is a quiet miracle, not far removed from striking a rock with a staff and watching a spring gush forth. He’d recall that once, two decades ago, the well had been empty. Sources of water were drying up, and so was the population. Long years of degradation had desiccated the region into an Indian dust bowl. In the language of EcoTipping Points, it had suffered a negative tip – a switch from sustainability to decline.

The story of Gopalpura and the Alwar district of Rajasthan paints a dramatic picture of what EcoTipping Points are and how they work. It concerns the most basic of resources: water. It demonstrates how a “negative tip” can take a vital resource away, and how a “positive tip” can bring it back. And it shows how the ripples from a relatively small event can change an ecosystem and a community.

Nor Any Drop to Drink

Water has always been a scarce commodity in the Alwar District. Buffered by the Aravalli range against the Thar Desert to the west, it receives a scant 16 inches of rainfall annually. Most of that rain falls during the months of the monsoon, from July through September, leaving soil to parch the rest of the year.

But the people themselves had rarely faced scarcity. Indeed, the district was once known for its high water table. As late as 1890, forests covered 60 percent of the land, where peasants gathered firewood and royal families went hunting for tigers. Fields were lush with wheat, mustard and beans, and villagers and livestock alike could all slake their thirsts.

The reason was that natives had spent millennia learning how to manage water. They had developed a social order in which even religious rituals reminded them how precious it was.

When a male child is born, or when a couple get married, the village has a ceremony where they walk around the well in worship of the water,” says Murali Lal Jangid, from the village of Jamdoli. “And when a person dies, the body is cremated, and the remaining bones are brought to a religious site where there is holy water, where they put the bones. So it shows how water is related to our culture from birth to death.

Ancient Hindu scriptures mention the key technology for managing water: rainwater harvesting. All over India, people had built structures to catch and hold the monsoon rains and store them for dry seasons to come. Archeologists have dated some rainwater catchments as far back as 1500 B.C.

In Rajasthan, the dominant structure was the johad, a crescent-shaped dam of earth and rocks, built to intercept runoff. A johad served two functions. On the surface, it held water for livestock. But like an iceberg, its most important parts were below the surface. By holding water in place, it allowed the liquid to percolate down through the bedrock. It recharged the water table below, as far as a kilometer beyond the johad. Stored underground, the water could not evaporate. In the midst of the dry season, without pipes or ditches to deliver water, villagers could always count on dipping it from their wells.

A johad was more than any one family could build. It took a village. But because every villager had a stake in the johads, residents banded together to build and maintain them. The rajas, the kings of small states who gave the region its name, would often finance construction of johads, taking a sixth of the crops in return.

Community institutions extended to other shared resources. Because forest conservation was bound up with water, villagers regulated the cutting of trees for fuelwood.

After centuries of relative stability, the social contract around water and trees began eroding late in the 19th century, once Great Britain had consolidated its control over India. Crown companies were hungry for timber, and too many princes were willing to provide it. First, they declared the forests off-limits to the villagers who had tended them for generations. Later on, they sold the logging rights.

Alwar kept its forests until the late 1940s, as India was gaining its independence. The local raja, afraid of losing his lands to the new national government, let the loggers in. The venerable trees turned into railroad ties and charcoal.

The deforestation of Alwar turned out to be a negative tip for the whole district. It set off a slow-motion chain reaction in which the ruin of one resource led to the ruin of others, and the impoverishment of nature led to the impoverishment of the people.

The first wave of degradation was the loss of the trees themselves. Their destruction starved out wildlife and exposed the fertile topsoil to erosion. When the rains came, they washed the dirt down the barren hillsides. Much of it ran into the sacred ponds. Over time, thousands of them were choked with silt.

As 2,500 johads were gradually buried, a second wave of devastation spread. With fewer and fewer ponds to recharge the water table, it retreated deeper and deeper underground. First rivers ran dry, then wells.

In earlier times, villagers might have dug out the silt and rebuilt their crumbling dams. But as the government seized more and more of their common lands, they had less and less incentive to protect what was left. Where farmers had once banded together to manage their resources, now they competed over the dwindling remains. Traditional village councils, called gram sabhas, fell apart, and a tradition of communal labor washed away with the topsoil.

“After independence,” recalls Gopalpura village elder Mangu Patel, “village unity collapsed, and the people neglected their structures, because they can only be made by a group, not by individuals. So, one by one, all the structures gradually deteriorated and stopped being used.”

In place of johads, the villagers tried modern technologies to keep the water flowing. With government aid, they sank deeper wells powered by diesel pumps. But the new tube wells and bore wells ensnared them in a vicious cycle. The water table was still not being recharged, which meant the farther they drilled, the more it dropped. Large swaths of Alwar became “dark zones” on government maps, areas where the groundwater was out of reach.

Eight or ten years ago, a new tube well came to our village,” says Jangdid. “When it was new, our village was very enthusiastic, [because this meant] there wasn’t much labor necessary to get the water. They just turned on the switch and got as much as they wanted. They took so much water, they could take it 24 hours a day. But because of that, groundwater levels dropped so much, that it’s impossible to get it more than five or six hours.”

In another vicious cycle, less groundwater led to less surface water and less transpiration from plants, which produced less rain. Monsoon seasons became shorter, from 101 days in 1973 to 55 days in 1987.

The final wave of degradation was social. Before the negative tip, well water had allowed farmers the luxury of a second crop, during the dry season. Now they were down to a single, rainy-season harvest. The land could no longer support the families who lived on it, and many families had to split up.

Like Okies in America’s Great Depression, able-bodied young men migrated to the shantytowns of cities like Delhi. They sent home cash to support their wives and children. Back in the villages, women and children had to spend up to 10 hours a day fetching firewood and water from distant locations. They hauled the water home in ceramic jugs. There was no time for children to go to school.

At the very beginning, we only had two wells that had water, and another one that we had to go to was very far away,” recalls Manbhar Devi, a female elder from the village of Bhaonta-Kolyala. “There was no agriculture, except what could be grown during the rainy season. And everyone was migrating out to look for a job, either to work as agricultural or construction laborers.”

The negative tip that had denuded Alwar of its trees was finally stripping it of its hopes for the future. The downward cycle seemed irreversible. But events would show that it was not.

The Force of Feedback

Hard times in the Indian countryside might seem a far cry from the stresses and strains of an American big city. But the negative tip suffered by Rajasthanis has a lot in common with social and environmental dilemmas faced by today’s urbanites.

Many of us know them on a daily basis. It’s the unceasing sprawl of the suburbs, paving over forests and turning green fields into subdivisions. It’s the growing number of days when a brown pall of smog hangs over downtown. We’re not walking hours to haul water, but we’re spending more and more time stuck in four-wheeled boxes, commuting ever-longer distances between work, home and shopping. On a larger scale, we can hear the gloomy drumbeat of species extinctions and watch the global thermometer inching up another notch.

What all these problems share is a sense of deadly momentum. It’s hard to recall just how the ball got rolling downhill. But by now, it’s rolling so fast, we feel helpless to stop it.

We try, but many of our solutions feel like fingers in the dike, pushing to hold back the force of an ocean. Sometimes, our best efforts seem to make the problems worse. We try to clear up crowded freeways by building more of them. But more roads attract more suburban development and more drivers. Soon the new roads are as clogged up as the old.

Why do environmental challenges feel so overwhelming? What makes the process of degradation so hard to fight? The emerging EcoTipping Points model offers answers. But it also shows that our worst crises contain seeds of hope. As we understand the workings of negative tipping points, we can better understand how to create positive ones.

A tipping point is a lever that sets in motion dramatic change in a system. It’s the practical application of one of the core insights of ecology: That you can change an entire system by changing one strategic part. The small action that changes the system is catalytic. It sets off a chain reaction, a cascade of effects that build on one another until they tip the entire system in a new direction.

EcoTipping Point stories have a “before” and an “after.” Before a negative tip, the eco-social system is sustainable. It supports people, plants and animals alike. It can absorb a lot of damage and keep on meeting their needs. But a negative tip pushes the system past a point of no return. In the aftermath, the system becomes unsustainable. It won’t support the same populations it did before.

In Rajasthan, a sustainable system based on rainwater harvesting had endured for thousands of years. Kings had come and gone. Droughts and floods had destabilized the system, but it had always recovered. Villages had rebuilt their johads, and the wells had kept on flowing.

Then came a catalytic action. It happened in the 1940s, when the raja opened up the region to logging. In its “after” state, a generation later, Alwar District had sunk into chronic conditions of scarce water or none, sparse vegetation and hardscrabble farming. The population dwindled, as locals left for the cities, bringing their numbers in line with their scanty resources.

It took time for Rajasthanis to realize their wells were running dry. Unlike a tornado or a tsunami, the negative tip was a natural disaster in slow motion. By the time they began responding, their predicament was hard to reverse. They knew that their chief response – digging deeper wells – was only making tomorrow’s problems worse. But they needed the water today.

What made it so hard to turn the negative tip around? The answer is the same dynamic that makes many environmental threats appear unstoppable. It’s the phenomenon of the feedback loop.

Feedback loops are the key to EcoTipping Points. They explain the mystery of how a small-scale action can set off large-scale change.

In the simplest terms, a feedback loop is a circular chain reaction. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle of cause and effect. Once the loop gets started, it keeps running on its own momentum. If there’s nothing to interrupt it, it can spin out of control and become a “vicious cycle.”

A classic example transpired during the Cold War. Each time the U.S. deployed more and better weapons, it inspired the Soviet Union to build more and better weapons. In turn, the Soviet threat caused the U.S. to escalate the contest still further. The result was a nuclear arms race, a feedback loop that spiraled for decades until one of the players crashed.

The power of a feedback loop lies in its ability to amplify a small action. That’s why many of our environmental problems feel so intimidating. We’re swimming against mighty currents. We’re fighting feedback loops, which render the forces against us more and more powerful.

We can see these currents at work in Rajasthan. Once the damage had begun, a series of interlocking feedback loops made it progressively worse. A few of those vicious cycles:

Trees and groundwater. As forests were cut down, johads were choked by eroded soil, less rainwater was channeled underground, and the water table dropped. As groundwater receded, the remaining trees found it harder to survive.

Wells and groundwater. As the aquifer fell, villagers drilled deeper wells. Those wells caused the aquifer to fall even more.

Community institutions and johads. As social institutions got weaker, villagers put less work into maintaining their johads. As the johads crumbled, people spent more time gathering water and wood. They had no time for common obligations, and community institutions became still more feeble.

Once we learn to look for feedback loops, we can identify them as culprits in a wide variety of ecological and social dilemmas, large and small.

For example, farmers often find their pesticides are becoming less potent, because pests evolve resistance to the poisons. A farmer can respond by spraying more chemicals or stronger chemicals. But in time, the bugs become immune to those, as well. As the farmer keeps upping the ante, ponds become polluted and other animals get sick – including human beings. He discovers that he can never get ahead. His costs go up and up while his crop yields do not.

In the process of urban sprawl, people flee crowded and crime-ridden cities for suburban neighborhoods. But as the suburbs fill up, they often develop the same crime and congestion as the central city. Homeowners who can afford it move farther out, until urban pathologies catch up with them again.

With each move, the side-effects multiply. There’s a longer drive to get to work or play, while more countryside is gobbled up by asphalt. Like the farmers of Rajasthan, suburbanites are simply meeting today’s needs. But in the long run, they’re degrading an ever-shrinking resource in an ever-widening radius.

On a worldwide scale, climatologists have pointed out vicious cycles within the ultimate negative tip: global warming. Although human emissions of greenhouse gases are the major cause, certain geophysical feedbacks are speeding the process up.

One such loop involves polar ice, which reflects a portion of the sun’s radiation back into space. As the atmosphere gets warmer, ice caps are shrinking. A smaller percentage of solar energy gets reflected, and the air becomes a little hotter.

In parallel fashion, swelling sea levels are speeding the breakup of polar ice shelves. As more ice melts, the oceans rise relentlessly higher.

How do we resist the insistent force of a feedback loop? How can we step off an eco-social treadmill? Those might be the toughest questions we face, as environmentally-concerned citizens of our towns, our nations and our planet.

The unexpected answer might be that we don’t have to fight these feedback loops at all. In dozens of environmental struggles, citizens are using a radically different strategy. They’re using feedback to their own advantage. They’re turning the loops around. They’re creating EcoTipping Points.

A positive tip is a mirror image of a negative one. By changing one link in the chain, we can sometimes set a feedback loop spinning in the opposite direction. Or we can launch new feedback loops that work for sustainability instead of against it. Just as a negative tipping point spawns vicious cycles, a positive tipping point – an EcoTipping Point – generates virtuous cycles. It turns the system from decline to a course of restoration and sustainability.

That’s what happened when Gopalpura created an EcoTipping Point, three decades after its negative tip. As we will see, the initial catalytic action was like a pebble dropping in a pond. As virtuous cycles rippled outward, they began to reverse the cycles of despair, transforming the lives and landscapes of thousands of rural Indians. They rippled outward from a well in Gopalpura.

Return of the Johad

Water was not on the mind of an idealistic, 28-year-old doctor, when he stepped off the bus in Alwar District in 1985. Rajendra Singh was hoping to start a medical clinic.

The son of a well-off landowner in the state of Uttar Pradesh, Singh had earned a degree in Ayurvedic medicine, a traditional Indian system that bolsters the body’s ability to heal itself. After graduation, he’d moved to Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, and joined Tarun Bharat Sangh, meaning “Young India Organization.” The group followed a Gandhian philosophy of helping poor workers to help themselves.

But Singh was restless in the city. By day, as he worked a government job, he felt he was only teaching the needy to rely on a bureaucracy. He formed a more radical plan, to work in the most destitute corner of Rajasthan. He sold his furniture and sent his young wife to live with her parents. With four friends, he boarded a bus and vowed to ride to the end of the line. The end of the line turned out to be a village called Kishori.

Kishori did not welcome them with open arms. Five strange young men from the big city were as likely to be terrorists as social workers. After questioning and searching them, villagers relented and gave them shelter in a local temple. A sympathetic landlord in nearby Bhikhampura eventually offered them a two-room house.

Singh opened his clinic, but the villagers seemed uninterested in supporting it. He soon found out they had more pressing needs. One day, as he was walking home from nearby Gopalpura, he got a ride from the driver of a camel cart. The driver was Patel.

As the two talked, Singh learned that Patel owned 200 bighas of land, about 600 acres, in an area where the average landholding was a mere 3 to 6 acres. By local standards, Patel was a wealthy man. But he couldn’t support his extended family. He had three grandsons running bicycle taxis in the city of Ahmedabad, 430 miles away. Each made 30 rupees a day, about $2.43 in U.S. dollars. It was more than they could earn by farming.

Twenty years later, Patel still recalls that first meeting: “I asked him, ‘Why are you here, wandering around? Don’t you have any work to do?’ and he said, ‘I’m here to do some social work.’

“He had planned to work for the education of children and health projects, but I was the person who told him ‘No, the immediate need is for water. If you work for water, we will help you.’”

At age 60, Patel was old enough to remember days when the johads had been full of water instead of mud. On his suggestion, Singh and two colleagues took up pickaxes and spades and began to dig out one of the ponds.

At first, the three worked alone. But Patel offered grain to anyone who would help. In a time of drought, food was a powerful enticement to pitch in. After seven months, the johad had been excavated to a depth of 15 feet. Singh and his colleagues set down their shovels and awaited the monsoons.

Rain fell on Rajasthan. As luck would have it, the monsoon of 1986 was the region’s first significant precipitation in four years. By the end of the season, the pond was full. And something unexpected had happened. A neighborhood well, one that had long been exhausted, had begun flowing again. Gopalpura had created its EcoTipping Point.

Trickling up

Water was not all that began flowing. The rebirth of rainwater harvesting set loose a cascade of constructive forces, in Gopalpura and beyond. The effects ping-ponged from ecosystem to social system and back, and the momentum got stronger and stronger, as both systems began to heal themselves.

The first wave of effects swept through Gopalpura itself. Singh’s original pond inspired villagers to take on a bigger job: a crumbling irrigation dam. Technical advice and food for the workers were donated from outside. The residents themselves contributed 10,000 person-days of labor. By the next monsoon season, the dam was reconstructed, 20 feet high and 1,400 feet long.

One achievement kept leading to another. By 1996, a survey found Gopalpurans had built nine johads, covering 2,381 acres and holding 162 million gallons of water. Groundwater had risen from an average level of 45 feet below the ground to 22 feet. On government maps, the area changed from a dark zone to a white one, indicating a surplus of groundwater.

The ascending aquifer trickled up through the village economy. Moister subsoil allowed crops to thrive with less irrigation. Because well levels were higher, less fuel was needed to pump water to the surface. The expense of diesel fuel dropped 75 percent. The area of wheat fields jumped from 33 to 108 hectares, and some farmers diversified into sugarcane, potatoes and onions.

Many of their fields could now produce two crops, one in the rainy season and one in the dry. “Villages who are harvesting rainwater have at least two crops a year, but the villages who aren’t have only one crop or no crop,” says Maulik Sisotia, a TBS volunteer.

As people ate and drank better, so did their livestock. There were more leftover leaves and stems to serve as fodder for sheep, goats and dairy cows. The number of stands in the Alwar district selling kalakand, a sweet cake made from condensed milk, jumped from 11 to 100, selling 22 tons of milk cakes every year.

As village society reassembled, so did its basic unit: the family. Young men came home from distant cities, to work in the fields year-round. Their wives, freed from long walks for water and fuelwood, had more time for housekeeping and child care. Their daughters, no longer needed for hours of chores, had time to go to school.

“Now, there are two schools,” says female elder Manbhar Devi of nearby Bhaonta-Kolyala, “for small children and older children as well. At that time [before rainwater harvesting], not a single girl went to school. Their parents didn’t let them go to school. Now every family sends both boys and girls to school, and at least they can finish their primary education here in this village.”

With the gift of spare time, some women earned extra money through soapmaking, carpet making, spinning and weaving. If they needed seed money, they could borrow it from samuhs, revolving loan funds started by the women themselves.

Phuli Devi belongs to a samuh in Bhikampura. “They are collecting 100 rupees per month,” she explains. “And whenever we need it, someone in the collective can borrow it at a very small interest rate, say 2 rupees per month. Ten or fifteen women come together and pool their money.

“During this severe drought, whenever we need, we take the loan from the self-help group whenever we need to. And so because of this, we can solve so many problems, nobody needs to migrate from this place.”

As their quality of life improved, Gopalpura’s residents realized that their social order depended on the natural one. They had restored one resource. They were ready to bring back another: trees.

Their revived community council, the gram sabha – with participation from every family – decided to reforest 10 hectares next door. The trees would help protect the johads, by cutting down on soil erosion. They would provide fuel and feed, saving villagers another agonizing daily walk. Residents could break off dead branches for firewood, but to protect the forest from overuse, they would be fined 11 rupees for cutting green ones. Any witness who failed to report a violation could be fined, as well.

To symbolize the villagers’ commitment to their newly-planted woods, TBS adapted an old religious ritual. The rakhi was a brightly-woven bracelet, worn by family members and friends as a promise of mutual protection. As villagers planted trees, they performed ceremonies in which they tied rakhis around the trunks.

“The father of water is the tree,” says Singh, “and the mother of water is the forest. So if your father and mother are not healthy, the children will not be healthy either.”

Ripples in Rajasthan

Multiply Gopalpura by 750 villages, and you can imagine the power of an EcoTipping Point. As visitors carried the news home, other towns constructed their own rainwater basins. The practice spread further as jal yodhas, or “water warriors,” went on evangelical walking tours, called padyatras. Two years after the first johad, nine were built nearby. The next year saw 36 structures. The year after saw 90.

By 2005, TBS counted 5,000 structures in 750 villages, dotting 3,000 square miles over five districts. Alwar’s forest had spread 33 percent in fifteen years. A survey of 970 wells in 120 villages found that all were flowing – including 800 that had been dry just six years before.

Gujar Kanhaiyalal, a resident of Bhaonta-Kolyala, recalls the vivid change. “In 1985 to 1988 there was a big drought in Rajasthan. In Bhaonta there were 20 wells, but only two or three had water. But in the next drought, from 1999 to 2002, not a single well dried up.”

In Kanhaiyalal’s village, johads brought a dead river back to life. In 1990, he and his neighbors built a catchment dam across the dry Arvari riverbed. After the monsoons had filled the new basin, a small stream sprang up, downhill from the dam. It ran a few weeks. As they built more structures to recharge the aquifer, the stream ran for a longer time, until in 1995, it was running all year long. Four other rivers later resumed year-round flows.

The new rivers and watering holes attracted animals. Bhaonta-Kolyala reforested 1,500 acres of the neighboring hills and declared it a people’s wildlife sanctuary. Named after the local deity Bhairon Dev, it provided habitat for birds and mammals, such as sambar deer, nilgai antelopes, porcupines and jackals. Villagers caught glimpses of leopards, which they hadn’t seen in twenty years.

So valuable were the resurrected rivers that they drew another predator: state government. Officials had largely ignored the watershed, but now, the fisheries department claimed the Arvari’s water and its creatures as state property. It sold fishing contracts to private companies. Realizing their hard-won resource could be lost, 70 villages along the river formed the Arvari Sansad or river parliament. The body had no legal standing. But it organized mass protests and got the contracts revoked. Today, the parliament meets twice yearly to tackle new challenges.

The Arvari conflict was not an isolated problem. As villagers created new resources, they sometimes stirred up the same social forces that had plundered their old ones. But this time around, their village councils did not collapse into disunity. Instead, they got stronger. The same momentum that had restored their countryside and their communities was also restoring their will to defend them.

Two years after Gopalpura had planted trees, government officials cited residents for encroaching on public land. The state flattened the forest and slapped a fine on TBS. But after a two-year struggle, officials reversed themselves. They granted the village an additional 10 hectares, along with 10,000 rupees for tree-planting.

TBS defied the state again in the early 1990s. In the heart of Rajasthan lay a national park called the Sariska Tiger Reserve. Its long-time residents were building johads, but their wells were not filling up. The problem turned out to be illegal marble mines, which were sucking the groundwater dry. In spite of threats from the “marble mafia,” TBS sued to close the mines. More than once, Singh and other organizers were beaten by hired thugs. But the group finally won a Supreme Court order, shutting down 471 pits. Villagers got their groundwater back, and more tigers roamed the reserve.

As recently as 2001, the state ordered TBS members to destroy a dam at Lava Ka Baas village or face arrest. The residents, however, would not let the bulldozers near. For two months, they held a vigil over the structure, night and day. In the end, authorities backed down.

Today, the water warriors of Rajasthan are confronting the government on a national scale. In 2002, the national government announced a plan to help 100,000 villages with no water source. The plan would spend up to $125 billion on a centralized network of canals and pipelines, to hook up 37 river basins. Much of the money would come from private companies. Just as Alwar’s forests had been snatched from the public domain, the nation would hand over vast quantities of its water to corporate ownership. Farmers would have no control over its availability or its price.

Singh has a different vision. He maintains it’s far cheaper to help villages create and control their own water supplies than to build more gargantuan dams and ditches. TBS and other groups have joined in a National Water Convention and a national walking tour, setting foot in 30 states.

Singh compares his peaceful warriors to another independence campaign, 70 years earlier, when Gandhi made spinning wheels and homemade cloth or khadi into symbols of a self-sufficient India.

“If Gandhi were alive today, what would he be doing?” says Singh. “Instead of using the khadi as the symbol, he would be making johads, because today the biggest exploitation is groundwater mining and the commercialization of water.”

From Vicious to Virtuous

The water wars are not raging only in Rajasthan. As the planet’s population tops six billion, and 35 percent are critically short on water, there’s more and more pushing and shoving worldwide over who will get their share.

Even in the world’s wealthiest country, conflicts are erupting over resources like the Ogallala Aquifer. This underground sea, stretching beneath America’s Great Plains, has dropped an average of 10 feet a decade, shrinking irrigated land by 20 percent. Farmers are fighting a proposal to draw it down even faster by piping the water to big cites like Dallas and El Paso.

If we look at these stories through the lens of EcoTipping Points, we can see that each region is in the midst of a negative tip. Water is scarce, and feedbacks from human activity are making it scarcer.

Rajasthan shows us how we can turn such vicious cycles around. As the positive tip unfolds, it sets off feedback loops that run in the opposite direction from the negative tip that preceded it. In Alwar, the same forces that were running the region into ruin changed course and began to build it back up:

Trees and groundwater. The rise in the water table encouraged villagers to protect their gains by planting trees. Their canopies and their roots reduced soil erosion and siltation of johads, allowing more rainwater to seep underground and raise the water table.

Wells and groundwater. As the aquifer got closer to the surface, villagers needed less water for irrigation. They pumped less, allowing their wells to fill even faster.

Community institutions and johads. As villagers built johads, they revived gram sabhas to manage them. As these village councils grew stronger, they planned, built and maintained more johads.

None of these virtuous cycles would have started without a catalytic action to set them in motion. In Rajasthan, that action was Singh’s excavation of the first johad.

The EcoTipping Point, the strategic piece of the system that was changed by Singh’s act, was altering the landscape to channel the runoff of rainwater. Instead of washing uselessly down the gully, the water had a chance to seep slowly into the ground. That small change was enough to turn the villagers’ relationship with the aquifer upside down. After years of taking too much water out of the land, they began to put it back.

It’s like a bank,” says Singh. “If you make regular deposits, then you’ll always have money to withdraw. If you are just taking, then you’ll have no money in your bank account.”

Once the wells started flowing, a chain reaction followed. The villagers saw rapid results from their work. Because they got a quick payback on their labor, they were inspired to build another dam, and another.

To put it in the language of EcoTipping Points, the catalytic action set off a short feedback loop. The loop had four parts:

By changing the landscape, Singh changed the water table.
Raising the water table, in turn, raised the levels in the wells.
The wells improved the lives of the villagers.
The villagers were moved to change the landscape still more, closing the loop. The virtuous cycle went around a second time, as they built a second johad, and kept on spinning.

In most positive tips, the initial feedback loop is a rapid one. The shorter the loop, the faster momentum can build, and the faster the changes can multiply. Success breeds success.

The multiplication of johads was just one of the rich array of virtuous cycles that spun off from Alwar’s original positive tip. Some loops revived ecosystems. Others boosted local economies and social institutions. Some brought back old traditions. Others created new ones, bringing new occupations and opportunities for local women.

Rajasthan’s story illustrates how ecosystem and social system depend on each other, as feedbacks bounce back and forth between society and nature. Villagers learned that the best way to restore their human habitat was to restore natural ones. And those natural habitats had slid so far, from forest to near-desert, that they needed human helping hands to recover.

Other loops have been geographic. Expanding patiently from village to village, in twenty years rainwater harvesting has touched the lives of 700,000 people. As people relearned the art of self-government, they moved from village institutions to regional ones, like the Arvari River Parliament. As India debates water policy, Rajasthan’s story is becoming a model for the whole country.

Perhaps the most crucial feedback loops were psychological and spiritual. As they built up their futures, stone by stone, villagers were also recharging their collective pride. From being victims of history, they became water warriors.

“They feel, ‘We have given our work to this, so this is ours,’” says Sisotia. “So they maintain it regularly, and they have a feeling of ownership. It’s natural if you participate in something, then you are very caring about it, so it should not be damaged.”

Just as feedback loops make negative tips so hard to resist, they can generate staying power for positive ones. For Gopalpurans and their neighbors, that power was strong enough to battle back against the very government forces that had overwhelmed them a generation before. They learned that their positive tip was self-sustaining, and their eco-social system was sustainable.

Lessons about EcoTipping Points from the Rainwater Harvest Story

Strong local democratic institutions are both a prerequisite and a result of successful catalytic actions. In the communities which had not formed Gram Sabha, (independent village councils), the construction of the johads either failed or were less successful than those which created them. The labor-intensive work of building johad and planting trees demanded unity and commitment from the beneficiary communities. This cooperative effort in turn strengthened village solidarity. This is significant as strong communities are better equipped to deal with powerful interests who are in a position to exploit newly created assets such as regenerated forests or groundwater. In this case, revival of the Arvari and other rivers attracted the attention of the state government. It began offering licenses to commercial fishers, but the villagers mobilized and successfully blocked this action. This prompted villages sharing the Arvari basin to form an Arvari Parliament to coordinate use of the river and prevent further power plays from outside or within.
Initial short feedback loops--or quick results--motivate and inspire people toward further action, even if the longer-term process of "tipping" ultimately involves more effort. The johads began yielding results within one to three years of construction. In the context of development, fast results are an important motivator as resources are few and people may be too impoverished to make choices for the long term. The construction of johad increased water levels in wells after the first monsoon, which fulfilled immediate needs. This provided encouragement and stimulus to build on the early successes by making improvements on other areas of the watershed through repairs to existing structures, bunding, terracing, planning of more johads, or reforestation efforts.
EcoTipping Points involve natural and social forces doing much of the work. While construction of johads was labor-intensive, once completed, natural processes took over when monsoon rains caused water to be captured and to quickly percolate into the soil, raising the water table and village wells.
A perceived sense of crisis will motivate people to act. Lack of water was pushing people toward the edge of malnourishment, leaving them vulnerable to crises such as drought, and forcing able-bodied people into cities for work, children out of school, and women on increasingly longer walks to find water sources. While the villagers knew that this was a priority, there was no sense of collective organization to strategize and find solutions to the problem. When TBS came to work on health care and education, a village elder pointed out that long-term necessities were unthinkable in the face of the urgent need for water. By identifying the problem, TBS was able to focus on this higher priority, and eventually enlist support of the villagers in a way they were not able to with their previous development projects.
The EcoTipping Point draws on both social and ecological memory. Reviving the tradition of building johads was possible as elders in the village remembered when they were still used and maintained, and were able to offer accurate knowledge of the technical aspects of construction, such as the location, height, and position of the johad. The local custom of "shramdan" or voluntary labor, was crucial in getting the johads built with limited resources. As TBS expanded its operations, other traditions such as padyatra, or foot marches, were key in spreading the message to other villages. Johads had evolved to suit this hilly terrain, and so these features of the landscape helped to capture and store rainwater underground, especially when combined with reforestation of native species.

Feedback Analysis of the Rajasthan Rainwater Harvest Story

~ Gerry Marten

The negative tipping point in this story was commercial logging concessions granted by the rajahs shortly before India’s independence. A system of vicious cycles was set in motion by the ensuing cascade of effects:

Logging reduced the forest’s protection of the watershed from soil erosion. Soil erosion and the sediment load in rainwater runoff increased. More sediment was deposited in johad ponds, reducing their capacity to channel water to the aquifer. With less water input to the aquifer, the water table slowly dropped. Trees and other vegetation died when the water table fell beyond reach of their roots. The loss of vegetation led to even more erosion and sediment in the runoff.
Villagers compensated for the drop in the water table by using tube well technology to dig deeper wells. That lowered the water table even further, forcing the digging of even deeper wells.
More sediment deposition in the johad required more labor to remove it. This, and the fact that the water supply was shifting to deeper and deeper tube wells, reduced the villagers’ motivation to maintain the johad. As they fell into disrepair, the johad gradually went out of use along with the social institutions and technology for maintaining them.
Eventually the water table was so low that even the deepest tube wells were drying up. So did the irrigation water necessary for dry-season agriculture. Men moved to cities to find work, leaving villages without the labor supply needed to maintain the johad. This accelerated decline of the johad and depletion of the aquifer even further.

As can be seen in the diagram below, the four vicious cycles listed above were interconnected and mutually reinforcing. The end result was disappearance of the johad and loss of the local water supplies and village forests. Women and children were cast into a nightmare of walking long distances to collect water and fuel wood. Children had no time for school, and women had little time for other family responsibilities and economic activities.

Rajasthan Negative

The positive tipping point was the restoration of a single johad in Gopalpura village, along with restoration of the traditional gram sabah village council to manage it. The ensuing cascade of effects reversed three of the feedback loops in the negative tip, transforming the vicious cycles to virtuous cycles:

Water soon returned to wells near the johad, stimulating the villagers to restore more johad. The technology and social institutions for restoring, maintaining, and building new johad, evolved as more johad were put into service.
The water table rose, filling more wells and restoring irrigation agriculture. Men moved back to the villages, providing the labor necessary to restore, build, and maintain even more johad.
With the water table once again close to the surface, the villagers planted trees to restore the village forest. The forest not only provided fuelwood but also reduced soil erosion, reducing sedimentation of the johad and making them easier to maintain.

The virtuous cycles continued until all village wells were flowing and the village locked into a sustainable water supply. Women and children no longer had to spend long hours getting water and fuelwood. Children returned to school and women returned more attention to family and economic activities. A new virtuous cycle was set into motion when people from other villages heard about the success in Gopalpura and came to see what happened. Johad spread to hundreds of villages.

Rajasthan Positive

This article is based on detailed documentation by Amanda Suutari during two site visits to Rajasthan. Click here to see the complete source document, including quotes from interviews.

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