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The smaller, the better

MICHAEL EVENARI, an Israeli scientist, was intrigued when he saw ancient towns in the middle of the Negev desert which gets only about 100 mm of rain every year. Not only did they have their own drinking water systems, but surplus for agriculture too!

His research on this led to a pathbreaking finding, that small catchments manage to hold more water than larger ones. He showed that 3,000 micro-catchments of 0.1 hectares each give five times more water than one catchment of 300 hectares!

Similar studies by the Central Soil and Water Conservation Research Institute at its campuses in Agra, Bellary, Kota and Shillong have shown that 10 tiny dams with a catchment of one hectare each would collect more water than one larger dam with a catchment of 10 hectares. The late Anil Agarwal of the Centre for Science and Environment calculated that on average each Indian village can harvest about 3.75 billion litres of water every year! This can not only cater to all the drinking water needs of the human and cattle population, but also provide for some irrigation.

Himanshu Thakkar of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People questions the wisdom of letting rain water flow hundreds of kilometres into a big river and then spending crores of rupees to divert it back again to irrigate lands where it originally fell as rain.

Being "monsoon country", Indian villages get most of their rain as a heavy downpower for just a 100 hours out of the total 8,760 hours in a year. This water must be stored properly and used sensibly during the 8,660 hours without rain.

India has a rich tradition of water harvesting at the local level. Whether they are the `zings' of Ladakh, the `ahars' of Bihar, the `johads' of Rajasthan, the `baolis' of North and Central India, the `eris' of Tamil Nadu or the `kuntas' of Andhra Pradesh, people in each region have evolved their own techniques keeping in mind the local geo-climatic zone.

With the emergence of modern irrigation and the spread of commercial agriculture, state institutions and rich farmers try to snatch two, even three, harvests of cash crops from the soil. This is when systems of community-based water conservation and use get neglected. The rich landowners would rather get irrigation water or, even better, pump groundwater with electricity, all of which are subsidised in the name of the poor.

Even in the context of a growing commercialisation of agriculture and increasing integration with the market, it is possible to both encourage water conservation as well as promote efficiency of water use. But the trends point to an entirely different direction. While irrigation canals accounted for 41.3 per cent of the irrigated area in 1970, this had fallen to 31.3 per cent by 1998. During the same period, the net area irrigated by tubewells rose from 14.3 per cent to 33.8 per cent, while the net area irrigated by tanks declined from 13.2 per cent to 5.7 per cent. — A.A.

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