Re-adopting traditional practices has re-animated a desert-region in India's state of Rajasthan. Wells, forests, communities and animals - all started coming back!

Eric Schneider, YL Magazine, Berlin

"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. But now, the water had returned. How that?"

The wells in Rajasthan’s Alwar District had dried up, thrusting the people into abject and seemingly inescapable poverty. In the language of EcoTipping Points, it had suffered a negative tip – a switch from sustainability to decline.

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.

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.

It started in the spare, humble village of Gopalpura. Nearly a thousand villages are now following Gopalpura’s example.

Further, this experience has triggered a strong feeling of stewardship in the population, making it resistent against short sighted outward interference into the life-systems of their region.

Below follow an article that originally appeared in Wordwatch Magazine, a couple of ETP graphics and a few thoughts from our side about scaling this important work. You can be an important part of this. Start with reading this page to the end. Enjoy! 

The Rebirth of Rajasthan

orig. publ. in Worldwatch Magazine www.worldwatch.org

A set of feedback loops has transformed an Indian dust bowl, in the northwestern state of Rajasthan. Water has always been scarce in Alwar District. A scant average of 40 centimeters of rain falls each year, most of it during the three months of the monsoon. But over the millennia, farmers had used rainwater harvesting to get the most out of every drop. They had constructed johads, earthen embankments to trap the monsoon rains. Water from johad ponds had seeped into the aquifer below, recharging wells and supporting forests over 60 percent of the district.

Alwar’s delicate balance was upset in the 1940s, when commercial logging set off a slow-motion chain reaction. Topsoil washed down the steep slopes and silted up the johads. With fewer johads to refill the water table, wells and even rivers began to run dry.

Vicious cycles sped up the decline. Modern tube wells bored deeper and sucked out more groundwater, requiring even deeper wells. Retreating groundwater meant fewer functioning wells, less vegetation, and still more erosion. With less irrigation water, farming declined, and men migrated to cities for work. Women and children had to spend up to 10 hours a day fetching firewood and water. The shrinking labor force and fraying social fabric sapped the means and the will to maintain johads.

Rainwater ponds had gone virtually out of use by 1985, when five young volunteers arrived from an anti-poverty group called Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS). One of them, a doctor named Rajendra Singh, was hoping to start a clinic.

But Mangu Patel, a large landowner from the village of Gopalpura, told him the immediate need was for water.

“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.”

With water just a short walk away, women had time to start cooperatives, selling milk products, handicrafts, and soap. Children had time to go to school. With irrigation restored, men came home for dry-season farming. The area of wheat fields jumped from 33 to 108 hectares, and some growers diversified into sugar cane, potatoes, and onions.

Emboldened by success, the village council reforested a neighboring 10 hectares and set strict conservation rules. Families could break off dead limbs for fuelwood, but were fined for cutting living ones. To underscore their commitment to the trees, villagers tied colorful rakhis, or kinship bracelets, around their trunks, a symbol of family protection.

As other villages witnessed Gopalpura’s rebirth, they sought TBS’s help to restore their own rainwater harvesting structures. By 2005, there were 5,000 johads in 750 villages, over an area of 8,000 square kilometers. A survey of 970 wells found all of them flowing—including 800 that had been empty just six years before. Alwar’s forest cover had spread 33 percent in 15 years, and five dried-up rivers had come back to life, resurrecting habitats for rarely seen animals like antelopes and leopards.

Most important, Alwar’s farmers organized to protect their hard-won resources. Several villages defeated efforts by state officials to cut down trees and tear down rainwater dams, sometimes by sitting-in at the sites. When the state sold commercial fishing rights to the reborn Arvari River, 70 villages united to get the sales canceled. Residents of the Sariska Tiger Reserve successfully sued to drive out the “marble mafia,” whose illegal mines drained and poisoned their groundwater.

“They feel, ‘We have given our work to this, so this is ours,’” says TBS volunteer Maulik 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.”

Alwar demonstrates how a vicious cycle can flip over to a virtuous one. After years of taking too much water out of the ground, farmers began to put it back. The constructive feedback loops that followed were mirror images of the destructive ones that came before:

• As their wells revived, villagers were moved to build more johads, bringing still more wells back to life.
• Higher groundwater sustained the forests and vegetation that prevent erosion, further protecting the johads.
• As workers returned to the villages, more labor was on hand to construct and maintain new johads.
• The rewards of united action made village social institutions stronger, which inspired more community action.

An apt image for the reversal of a vicious cycle is Aikido, the martial art that turns around an attacker’s force and directs it back at the attacker. After a positive environmental tip, some of the same eco-social currents that were degrading a system start building it back. Instead of fighting natural and social forces, citizens are working with them. They feel less like Sisyphus, pushing a boulder uphill, and more like Archimedes, given a lever and a place to stand.

Below are a two graphics illlustrating the system analysis for identifying the KEY element that needs to be addressed to turn the entire vicious cycle around to a virtuous cycle.

These graphics and the approach are very well explained in the original ETP case study article "Rajasthan’s Water Warriors : Restoring Rajasthan ’s Traditional Earthen Dams for Rainwater Harvesting and Groundwater Replenishment" @ http://ecotippingpoints.org/ETP-Stories/indepth/indiarainwater.html

Adapted from the ETP Project website.

All photos and graphics: www.ecotippingpoints.org

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