The pandemic brought residents to villages and a water harvesting enthusiast used this opportunity to quench the thirst of his parched village

A MGNREGA supervisor organises informal workers who returned home during the COVID-19 lockdown to bring water to his village in Rajasthan

SHRAVAN KUMAR cannot wait for the monsoon to get over. Between April and July, he conceptualised and executed the cleaning and repair of an aaw (traditional feeder canal) in a neighbouring village that used to supply water to a pond in his.The little rain that the villages in Rajasthan's Pali district has received so far indicates that the aaw is working fine. If things go as planned, the pond should have enough water by the end of the monsoon season to last the year. “I want to see how much water it can harvest,” he says.

Kumar of Manihari village supervises works under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 (MGNREGA). Since 2009, he has helped build 11 tankas—a traditional water harvesting and storage system in the state—in and around his village. “The region is surrounded by the Aravallis. If properly channellised, rainwater can be directed to waterbodies and replenish groundwater, providing enough for daily use,” he says.

Kumar had left Manihari in the early 2000s in search of work. He did odd jobs in various parts of the district for wages as low as 20 a day. In 2009, he returned to his village after hearing that work under MGNREGA was available. “This year, after the COVID-19 lockdown was announced, residents have returned to the village in large numbers. I took their help to revive the aaw in neighbouring Padarla village that was lying clogged and broken for decades. I discussed it with our sarpanch and he agreed. Even the residents of Padarla, most of whom belong to the Bhil tribal community, helped,” says Kumar.

His experience of building tankas came in handy. He could easily identify which part of the field will retain water for long. “The contractor for whom I worked while I was out of the village was in the business of building water tanks. I would dream of similar water storage facilities in the farmlands of my village,” he says. This was necessary because most farmers of Manihari have farmlands 5 to 7km from their homes. “No matter how much drinking water they carried to their field, it would get over and they had to leave work in the middle of the day and rush home. The plight of cattle was worse,” Kumar says. Not anymore.