Village democracy built on water

In August 1993, Rajendra Singh stood on barren land outside his ashram and proclaimed, “This will be a jungle in 10 years.” In October 2003, he goes for morning walks in that jungle.

A simple philosophy has gone a long way to restoring the agro-eco-climatic zone around the Sariska National Park, about 100 km east of Jaipur in western India, comprising a complex system with five main rivers and their tributaries. “Conserve water and protect forests. Rebuild the links between people, forests and water,” Singh says is the sum and substance of his work.

Nansa Ram, 65, wizened by walks in the Bhairon Dev forest, exemplifies this link. For four years till 1995, Nansa Ram took a pot of water from his Bhaonta village about two hours’ drive from Jaipur, into the hills every morning and poured it into hollows in the rocks. This wizened man of about 65 felt this was his duty to the wild birds and animals that lived in the hills above the village.

Nansa Ram stopped taking water to the hills when an anicut was built to check the flow of water and a little lake formed behind it. “My mission of seeing that the wild animals and birds of the forest had water was fulfilled,” he says.

Why did this man, a shepherd, decide to pour a symbolic pot of water every morning in some hollow in the rocks? It’s a hard trek up the hills carrying nothing at all, not to speak of a pot of water weighing several kilos. “When I started grazing goats in these hills, there were no sources of water through the summer. The goats survived because we had water in the village. I thought the wild animals and birds here would die if they didn’t get water to drink. So I started carrying a pot of water a day for them.”

Nansa Ram had taken one small symbolic step towards rebuilding the traditional links that existed across the land between people, forests and water.

This relationship sustained the human and natural resources of the region for millennia. Then, over a century ago, the links began to break.

The British Imperial Capital shifted to Delhi in 1910 and its huge energy requirements were fed from the wood from these forests. After independence in 1947, the Indian Forest Department continued the policy of selling firewood and timber to contractors and also prevented local people, who had lived with the forests for centuries, from either getting wood or other forest produce for their own use. The Indian Forest Department long considered forests to be a source of revenue rather than resources to be conserved.

“When the village people saw these last vestiges of forest that they had protected being hacked, they lost the feeling of ownership over forests and their stake in protecting them. They also joined in the plunder of the greens,” said Kanhaiya Lal, a project manager with Tarun Bharat Sangh, the non-profit organization that Rajendra Singh heads. TBS works out of an ashram about 80 km from Jaipur.

Things changed in the late-1980s when the Bhaonta village elder Sunder heard of a man who worked on water in a village a few kilometers away and went to meet him. “I asked Rajendra Singh to come and build an anicut in the hills above the village to help us recharge our village wells. When he came and saw the place, he said he could not do it and instead helped us dig a pond at another place.”

That was in 1989. Many anicuts and johads have come up around the village in a complex system of water conservation and harvesting. People now grow up to three crops a year where earlier they could barely manage one. Cattle and goats have lots of fodder and water. Wildlife from the nearby Sariska Tiger reserve stays out of the village as there are water sources in the hills; a few years ago it used to raid fields and water in the village.

The crowning glory of Bhaonta’s water conservation work has been creating the Bhairon dev Lok Van Jeev Abhyaran, or people’s wildlife sanctuary. This sanctuary is spread over 14 square kilometers and has been formed by the people of 5 villages who decided to protect their common lands, as also wasteland, that lay between their villages. In just seven years, the hills are green and covered with shrubs that will grow into trees. The Abhyaran is proof that people willing, old cultural links between man, water and forests can be revived, with dramatic effects.

Bhaonta’s is not an unmitigated success as is also the case with Rajendra Singh’s work. The major challenge to carrying forward the Bhaonta experiment is from other villages in the neighbourhood. They feel there are ample natural resources now and don’t feel the need to create more. In one village, Aghar, for example, that is much bigger, there are many people who have no connection with the land or forests. A sizeable percentage of the population produces hooch for which they need wood. Rather than pay, they go into the sanctuary and cut what they need. Others from the village follow their example.

“In a large village like ours with 5000 people, only those with a stake in agriculture are concerned about the environment. Traders, those making hooch and other such people have little interest in protecting it,” says Gauri Shankar, shopkeeper and farmer. “The TBS’s work has been extremely successful in Bhaonta because it is small and more people have a stake in farming.”

In other words, it is an economic necessity to protect the environment. If forests die, water sources dry up and agriculture suffers. Domestic animals also die and eventually so does the village. Small villages are more sensitive to environmental changes than large ones. This means that the TBS model will work only in settlements up to a certain size and fail in other cases.

Rajendra Singh reluctantly admits this. They have had the most dramatic effects in places where the population has been small and relatively homogenous in either caste or economic constitution. The system breaks down when the population grows larger and people from too many castes and walks of life enter the fray.

The solution to this has been to bind smaller villages together in a sort of scaling up operation. Realizing that the model works with small populations functionaries of Tarun Bharat Sangh have organized the Aravari Sansad, or Parliament. This is a collective of people from 72 villages, each of which sends two people, one a farmer and the other, a water conservationist to six-monthly meetings. This larger-than-village entity

The Sansad takes major policy decisions that govern the lives of the villagers such as fines to be imposed on people who let cattle overgraze, or cut green firewood for trees for fodder. It also works with the district administration to maintain law and order and reports offenders to the police. At times though the parliament has taken on the administration as when the state irrigation department tried to take control of the water resources created by village people. The district administration recently demolished the Parliament’s building.

“It is important for people to feel they have a collective voice and that they are not alone in the fight to protect their forests and water,” explains Rajendra. “It also overcomes the problem of uneven distribution of water due to varying commitment levels of people in different villages.”

It is not a confrontationist approach but a lead-by-example one that he and Kanhaiya hope will work with villages like Aghar. “They also live in the same place and benefit from the work being done around them. In time they will realize the value of this and will contribute,” they say, confidently.

Rajendra’s Aravari formula is simple, more like a touchstone than a chemical that can be poured on water. Learn with humility; understand popular needs; make people suggest their remedies; start small; deliver cheaply. These re-establish the links between people, forests and water.

The enthusiasm of the people working for a better future, both as staff of the TBS and in villages, is proof that both believe they can make a difference. It isn’t enough to talk about it but to do and show what is possible if the people decide to take their fate into their own hands rather than blame the government for their ills and then expect the same authority to rectify them. The people of Aravari have taken the lead to show what can be done with a true-bottoms up approach. And to think this is, inadvertently, what Nansa Ram, started off when he poured pots of water into crannies in rocks in the hills above Bhaonta.