When the water came down
Suppa Khalsa village in Gangakhed taluka of Parbhani district shows the way towards watershed conservation
To understand the impact of watershed conservation works such as de-silting a stream or digging contour trenches on a mountainside, one must look to a village such as Suppa Khalsa in Gangakhed taluka of Parbhani district.
The villagers of this hamlet set deep inside the rugged rocky terrain of the Deccan Plateau, are a proud lot. Two years ago, they were like many other villages in the area, dependent on the favour of the rain gods for their livelihood.
From the outside, the village, which was historically the seat of the local produce market in the Nizami times and boasts of dilapidated remnants of a killa, is as dry and dusty as any other in the region. Enter, and one can see the green fodder stacked high in some compounds, the odd green vegetable patches, clues to something different happening on the ground.
The difference is the Reliance Foundation, a nonprofit organisation led by Nita Ambani. The foundation has been working in 5,500 villages in 12 States and two Union Territories across the country towards watershed conservation as part of its ‘Bharat India Jodo’ initiative.
Watershed conservation has changed all that – this year there is water in every household and the water is supplied everyday from the village wells, 200 litres each day per household at a community levied cost of Rs 500 a month. In this village, water is actually available at 25-30 feet. The village also supplies water to neighbouring villages.
Several households still have kitchen gardens at the height of the summer water scarcity. “We have been able to conduct marriages and all the other functions that are normally conducted in the summer months,” says Laxman Chandrabhan Gholap, a farmer, in a reference to the widespread effects of the drought for the third continuous year which has seen villagers giving up lifetime savings in a bid to save their crops.
Situated on undulating land, the rain water at Suppa Khalsa used to run off the surrounding high ground, leaving the village wells dry a few months after the monsoon. But now, the villagers are learning to use the unforgiving terrain to their advantage. With help from RF experts, they have dug trenches on mountain ridges designed to exploit the terrain best. The 19,000 metres of trenches which surround the village will capture rain as it falls allowing it to percolate into the ground. Along the shallow valleys they are constructing small stone dams that will hold off rainwater till the level is crossed, again making room more percolation into the ground.
“Even if rainfall is deficient this year, we will still manage to capture most of it,” says Padmakar Phad, another farmer. “Last year with only partial watershed work, we managed to capture almost all the rain that fell. This year, we have completed the trenching, desilting and bund works, so we will definitely have more water.”
Says Yadavrao Padole of Reliance Foundation, “When we first came here, the villagers themselves identified water as the highest priority issue that needed to be tackled. We studied the topography and identified 54 villages which benefit from the same natural watershed system. Of these, we are currently working in 28 villages currently.” The idea he says is to rejuvenate the entire watershed system and thereby stabilise the local economy. Padole and his team have worked out solutions for each of the 28 villages they are working in. “It cannot be a case of one size fits all. The solutions must not only be location specific, they must also come from the community itself. We only provide technical expertise,” he says.
The return of water to the village has had another much-welcomed fallout: families that had begun migrating to the city in search of summer jobs are not doing so. Many have stayed back this year to prepare their farms for the rains. God willing.
With help from Reliance Foundation experts, villagers have dug trenches on mountain ridges designed to exploit the unforgiving terrain best