[Music]
before the drought caused by a shortage
of rainfall comes a drought of ideas
chatter sing is a shepherd farmer in the
deep power desert in our state of
Rajasthan and he sent in these words
through a letter that was read out in a
conference that met to discuss the
farmers deaths in Marathwada you see
Singh was very very disturbed at the
news of the deaths because he himself
had come out of two years of drought and
he wanted to offer his experience as a
solution
this is rest chuckling lips in the deep
are dessert a place that is dotted by
dunes hardrock and dry grasslands and
which gets just 80 millimeters of
rainfall in a year if you hark back to
the three slides we get nearly thousand
mm but she gets nearly 3,000 mm
Marathwada gets almost ten times this
and yet there is no water scarcity in
the place where a person lives in the
two years of drought they didn’t have to
call for a water tank up on the state
even a single time
here’s the dichotomy how does a farmer
from the deep thar desert go two years
in of a drop of a drought without
wanting for water when there are places
in India which gets so much more water
and the farmers as well as the people
suffer
let’s talk about water more specifically
let’s talk about how the tower achieves
this miracle I want to tell you a story
today of chatter Singh and what he was
done in
so we are in one of the driest parts of
Ilya this is the deep a desert it’s
beyond JSON it close to the border with
Pakistan
it’s a place as we saw it’s very little
rainfall in fact many years the amount
of rain that starts falling from the
skies evaporates even before it reaches
the parched earth it’s that kind of it’s
a place which is home to Shepherds who
have their goats sheep cows camels which
is what they call their walking gold
Amira child up was Sona is what they
call it because that’s their mainstay
and so of course food and water for
their animals is really important and
this is the kind of land we’re talking
about that land hard rock this believe
it or not is a catch eat it’s not lush
green forests it’s not large grasslands
it’s not what you think of as a
catchment this hard rock land is a
catchment for the desert and it slopes
gently when the rain does fall what
little falls here it falls on the slide
and then it rolls of a gentle slope of
MIDI afoot over a kilometre it rolls
into this this is a man-made depression
a lake which is primed and ready to
catch every little drop of rain that may
fall in a year believe it or not that 80
millimetres could come in just a single
day and then no rain for the rest of you
so one day and that man that they prep
they market with that pillar in the
middle
it’s called a boy gang and it’s supposed
to denote a sacred place this is a place
that is a place of water do not
desecrate it this is sacred to us it’s
not that they worship water in fact they
don’t it is that we respected
and when the rain does come and fills up
the water the lake they usually use the
water and all the villages around it use
that it’s a community lake it’s not it
doesn’t belong to one person or one
community it’s the whole community old
all the people in the village use it and
then of course as water evaporates or it
gets absorbed into the land it’s gone so
about eight months after the rains
there’s no water and this puts them
right in the middle of summer
blazing heat in Rajasthan and there’s no
water in the lake is that when they call
in the tankers nope
that’s when this structure takes over
these are berries or shallow percolation
wells which tapped the water that is
sitting above a gypsum layer that runs
through jessilee and as the women pull
up water from the well the well pulls in
water from the saturated earth around it
if you put you in here to this well
after women have pulled up water you can
actually hear the drops falling in and
it’s a wonderful sound it’s the sound of
rejuvenation it’s a metaphor almost for
the giving earth
one day chatter Singh and I hiked up the
steep side of a dune it was a blazing
June day 48 degrees and we went and sat
up there and I was wondering why we were
here I had stopped asking each other
saying why why we were going somewhere
he always had it easy and we were
sitting up there and he started digging
the dune and not six inches in he came
up with moist sand and this was 22
months after they had had any serious
rain
maybe they had a millimeter here and
three millimeters there but there was no
serious rain this was in the middle of
the drought and there six inches inside
a dune was moist sand it stunned me and
then sure enough we walked down the
other side of the dune and there was a
well
and dug by shepherds you see these
shepherds take their flock of sheep and
goat and they walk hundreds of
kilometres in this district they know
the land they know how it functions they
know where to look for water and they’re
in the most unlikely place for us
unlucky under a dune is a well and you
can see that it’s it’s just been it’s
just been used this water the ground
there was water in this well I peaked
not three feet down
and this is up to 22 months
summer summer is the time for
preparation in this area they know that
maybe they’ll get one day of rain and so
they have to prep the land so what do
these Shepherds do they collect Tony
acacia bushes and they line the the long
side of a depression manly depression
looking out the depression and then they
line the long side of the depression
with this phony acacia and they wait for
nature to do the thing because what’s
coming up to summer are the sand stalks
and once the sandstorm start up the wind
just throws the sand at the acacia
bushes and guess what the bunt against
built because the sand starts
accumulating in that you know the
obstruction it is found and a bun begins
to build and once the sand storms die
down the Shepherds come and they fortify
the pond the cause
when that one day of rain comes and the
water rolls down the catchment and stops
at that burn they don’t want the bunch
of each so they fortify it they don’t
even do they get that one day of rain
but it is summer they prep themselves
they prep the lab and this I’m standing
on a Bund when I’ve taken this picture
and guess what you know how old this one
is 700 years for this method of
rainwater harvesting in the desert is
ancient it’s not new and this man has
been there for all these years it has
held up and this this place where the
rain comes and stops is called a khadeem
and then the Shepherd’s wait longer for
the next two or three months they just
wait for all this rain water to seep
into the earth the earth drinks deeply
it is parched the drinks deeply it
saturates itself and once once the rain
once once the rainwater is gone that is
when the Shepherd’s plant their crops
I spoke to chapter safe two days ago he
was in his cutting planting mustard he
had waited amazingly over the protest
made this year there was a lot of rain
and he was planting and then they wait
another three months and after which
there are
crops what do they plant the plant wheat
the plant mustard different Granby plant
pena and if there’s not that much rain
there hasn’t been that much rain they
don’t think there’s that much water in
the earth they plant who are being so
they know the gauge they they listen to
the land they know what’s what it’s
telling them and that’s when it not in
that same village of ronger there is
another desert and this is the
government’s idea of greening the desert
someone’s sitting in an ivory tower far
away decided that they were going to
pipe water from the Himalaya down to the
desert to green the desert for
agriculture in the desert and so
hundreds of thousands of crores of
rupees later they indra Gandhi canal is
supposed to bring water from the
Himalaya to rambha for agriculture
the bad news there isn’t nearly enough
water the Rajasthan Ilyana and what the
canals look like in the sub canals the
little ones look like right now are
either their rivers of sand or they’re
choked with hyacinth their pick with
algae or their putrid with the carcasses
of animals that have fallen eat what
water does reach villages it smells it
stinks the people who are bought into
chatter scenes gene and have nurtured
their local sources of water they won’t
sit or touch one drop of this they don’t
use this for cooking drinking anything
maybe they’ll wash the camera cartilage
but they will not use it for anything
else but just like in every society
there are people who went whole hog and
bought into the government’s promises
and dreams and they depend upon the
canal for water for their irrigation and
as of 16th November 2017 three days ago
an article in the newspaper says that
there is an agitation in geometric
specifically Gomberg because these
farmers don’t have water there is no
water in the canal
and this year hospira great radio
progestin in the Saviour I asked a
person day before yesterday to send me
these images this is this Kadeem this is
the amount of water he is sowing his
seeds he has water the people who
dependent upon the canal
they are agitated they’re in a hunger
strike even as we sit in this room
listening
the other irony is that the people when
they ran out of water they didn’t have
water in the canal they came to Chapel
sinks
khadeem and asked for water those people
are farmers who depend upon the canal
they came to the Hadean to get water so
there you have it
survival in a drought prone region
teaches us a few things primarily number
one which is not on this is listen to
the land listen to what the land says
but in city after city state after state
country after country everywhere in the
world people divorced from the land
sitting in ivory towers are making plans
for the land and when planning is
divorced from the land for the village
we get floods in Chennai we get droughts
in California which are supposed to be a
paradise ready we get droughts in
California we get dust balls in China
and the tragedy we get people dying in
Marathwada and this list is hardly
exhausted
one it does not include number will be
diluted and we all know what’s happening
here
we this year had record rainfall 1200
millimeters we normally get under the
under a thousand we got 1200 millimeters
but there’s no change in our groundwater
level there is no extra water
availability in fact literally water
water everywhere and not a doctor to get
this with the Sinkin we get 3 billion
liters per day of rain averaged over the
earth we consume 1.8 billion liters day
we get nearly double what we need from
the rain but clearly as even the desert
has shown us it’s not about how much we
get it’s about what we do
and what do we do with it even 15 years
ago
the wetlands of Agora Lake Belen dude
and Bert food are kind of connected by
wetlands we can see that and in 2017
what have we done
we have sucked it dry filled it up built
around it and now we defecate these
lakes are cut cut off from each other
they are not connected anymore in the
way they were they should be and what
are we getting
and then opposed this list of lakes the
lakes of camping out as Bangalore and
all his descendants it’s been converted
into layouts stadiums and bus stands
unit
that’s what we’ve done to our local
sources of water we have gone against
every one of those tenets of survival in
a drought prone region and we are at the
doctor
so what are we done with shut up local
sources of water we’ve defiled then we
have sucked up our reserves 400,000
borewells
sucked Carl and dry they’re still
sucking on land dry and we have relied
on a single source that are very so far
away and the government so where do we
go from here I know it’s all human doing
right now right not so not so that’s
what is and we all know there is the
frothing and the foaming of our lovely
lake and this is what candy and what
candy is not really very far away
that is jakku the community came
together the residence the locals
everybody’s come together they’re still
working to clean the slate make it
viable and that’s happening it quite a
few leagues around town you see
kappa gatta when he established this
city and all his descendants they knew
that Pangloss sits atop 3000 feet of
granite gneiss all the rain that falls
is unlikely to just go up they created
Lakes cascading Lakes they created
thousands of wells because they knew
that the denizens of the city will need
water and they need the provider if he
do not have a perennial source but we do
not have a perennial river running
Topanga and so they thought about that
they listened to the land they studied
the land they knew where to build the
lakes and they built it and it
functioned for hundreds of years
hundreds of times until
maybe 1950 when Bangalore began to boom
and then we started forgetting our local
sources of water we started depending on
just one reservoir then another
reservoir and then finally the river far
away we did not nurture our wells we
built over it we did not know to release
so I’m going to leave you with this what
if what if we as a community took a
pledge what if we
decided to join the efforts that are
reclaiming our lakes and our Commons
what if we began to resurrect our open
we’re going back to what the land is
telling us to do
and then closer to home many of us live
in things that look like this or have a
roof or have a terrace
I’m standing on a circle it may be one
meter by one meter if the 1200
millimeters of rain fell here I would
have that many liters of water to drink
right it’s just that much surely we have
a book that’s bigger than this
what if Bangalore we prepare now we have
to prepare now to collect the rain that
is going to fall in 20 what are people
prepared to collect every
[Applause]
before the drought caused by a shortage
of rainfall comes a drought of ideas
chatter sing is a shepherd farmer in the
deep power desert in our state of
Rajasthan and he sent in these words
through a letter that was read out in a
conference that met to discuss the
farmers deaths in Marathwada you see
Singh was very very disturbed at the
news of the deaths because he himself
had come out of two years of drought and
he wanted to offer his experience as a
solution
this is rest chuckling lips in the deep
are dessert a place that is dotted by
dunes hardrock and dry grasslands and
which gets just 80 millimeters of
rainfall in a year if you hark back to
the three slides we get nearly thousand
mm but she gets nearly 3,000 mm
Marathwada gets almost ten times this
and yet there is no water scarcity in
the place where a person lives in the
two years of drought they didn’t have to
call for a water tank up on the state
even a single time
here’s the dichotomy how does a farmer
from the deep thar desert go two years
in of a drop of a drought without
wanting for water when there are places
in India which gets so much more water
and the farmers as well as the people
suffer
let’s talk about water more specifically
let’s talk about how the tower achieves
this miracle I want to tell you a story
today of chatter Singh and what he was
done in
so we are in one of the driest parts of
Ilya this is the deep a desert it’s
beyond JSON it close to the border with
Pakistan
it’s a place as we saw it’s very little
rainfall in fact many years the amount
of rain that starts falling from the
skies evaporates even before it reaches
the parched earth it’s that kind of it’s
a place which is home to Shepherds who
have their goats sheep cows camels which
is what they call their walking gold
Amira child up was Sona is what they
call it because that’s their mainstay
and so of course food and water for
their animals is really important and
this is the kind of land we’re talking
about that land hard rock this believe
it or not is a catch eat it’s not lush
green forests it’s not large grasslands
it’s not what you think of as a
catchment this hard rock land is a
catchment for the desert and it slopes
gently when the rain does fall what
little falls here it falls on the slide
and then it rolls of a gentle slope of
MIDI afoot over a kilometre it rolls
into this this is a man-made depression
a lake which is primed and ready to
catch every little drop of rain that may
fall in a year believe it or not that 80
millimetres could come in just a single
day and then no rain for the rest of you
so one day and that man that they prep
they market with that pillar in the
middle
it’s called a boy gang and it’s supposed
to denote a sacred place this is a place
that is a place of water do not
desecrate it this is sacred to us it’s
not that they worship water in fact they
don’t it is that we respected
and when the rain does come and fills up
the water the lake they usually use the
water and all the villages around it use
that it’s a community lake it’s not it
doesn’t belong to one person or one
community it’s the whole community old
all the people in the village use it and
then of course as water evaporates or it
gets absorbed into the land it’s gone so
about eight months after the rains
there’s no water and this puts them
right in the middle of summer
blazing heat in Rajasthan and there’s no
water in the lake is that when they call
in the tankers nope
that’s when this structure takes over
these are berries or shallow percolation
wells which tapped the water that is
sitting above a gypsum layer that runs
through jessilee and as the women pull
up water from the well the well pulls in
water from the saturated earth around it
if you put you in here to this well
after women have pulled up water you can
actually hear the drops falling in and
it’s a wonderful sound it’s the sound of
rejuvenation it’s a metaphor almost for
the giving earth
one day chatter Singh and I hiked up the
steep side of a dune it was a blazing
June day 48 degrees and we went and sat
up there and I was wondering why we were
here I had stopped asking each other
saying why why we were going somewhere
he always had it easy and we were
sitting up there and he started digging
the dune and not six inches in he came
up with moist sand and this was 22
months after they had had any serious
rain
maybe they had a millimeter here and
three millimeters there but there was no
serious rain this was in the middle of
the drought and there six inches inside
a dune was moist sand it stunned me and
then sure enough we walked down the
other side of the dune and there was a
well
and dug by shepherds you see these
shepherds take their flock of sheep and
goat and they walk hundreds of
kilometres in this district they know
the land they know how it functions they
know where to look for water and they’re
in the most unlikely place for us
unlucky under a dune is a well and you
can see that it’s it’s just been it’s
just been used this water the ground
there was water in this well I peaked
not three feet down
and this is up to 22 months
summer summer is the time for
preparation in this area they know that
maybe they’ll get one day of rain and so
they have to prep the land so what do
these Shepherds do they collect Tony
acacia bushes and they line the the long
side of a depression manly depression
looking out the depression and then they
line the long side of the depression
with this phony acacia and they wait for
nature to do the thing because what’s
coming up to summer are the sand stalks
and once the sandstorm start up the wind
just throws the sand at the acacia
bushes and guess what the bunt against
built because the sand starts
accumulating in that you know the
obstruction it is found and a bun begins
to build and once the sand storms die
down the Shepherds come and they fortify
the pond the cause
when that one day of rain comes and the
water rolls down the catchment and stops
at that burn they don’t want the bunch
of each so they fortify it they don’t
even do they get that one day of rain
but it is summer they prep themselves
they prep the lab and this I’m standing
on a Bund when I’ve taken this picture
and guess what you know how old this one
is 700 years for this method of
rainwater harvesting in the desert is
ancient it’s not new and this man has
been there for all these years it has
held up and this this place where the
rain comes and stops is called a khadeem
and then the Shepherd’s wait longer for
the next two or three months they just
wait for all this rain water to seep
into the earth the earth drinks deeply
it is parched the drinks deeply it
saturates itself and once once the rain
once once the rainwater is gone that is
when the Shepherd’s plant their crops
I spoke to chapter safe two days ago he
was in his cutting planting mustard he
had waited amazingly over the protest
made this year there was a lot of rain
and he was planting and then they wait
another three months and after which
there are
crops what do they plant the plant wheat
the plant mustard different Granby plant
pena and if there’s not that much rain
there hasn’t been that much rain they
don’t think there’s that much water in
the earth they plant who are being so
they know the gauge they they listen to
the land they know what’s what it’s
telling them and that’s when it not in
that same village of ronger there is
another desert and this is the
government’s idea of greening the desert
someone’s sitting in an ivory tower far
away decided that they were going to
pipe water from the Himalaya down to the
desert to green the desert for
agriculture in the desert and so
hundreds of thousands of crores of
rupees later they indra Gandhi canal is
supposed to bring water from the
Himalaya to rambha for agriculture
the bad news there isn’t nearly enough
water the Rajasthan Ilyana and what the
canals look like in the sub canals the
little ones look like right now are
either their rivers of sand or they’re
choked with hyacinth their pick with
algae or their putrid with the carcasses
of animals that have fallen eat what
water does reach villages it smells it
stinks the people who are bought into
chatter scenes gene and have nurtured
their local sources of water they won’t
sit or touch one drop of this they don’t
use this for cooking drinking anything
maybe they’ll wash the camera cartilage
but they will not use it for anything
else but just like in every society
there are people who went whole hog and
bought into the government’s promises
and dreams and they depend upon the
canal for water for their irrigation and
as of 16th November 2017 three days ago
an article in the newspaper says that
there is an agitation in geometric
specifically Gomberg because these
farmers don’t have water there is no
water in the canal
and this year hospira great radio
progestin in the Saviour I asked a
person day before yesterday to send me
these images this is this Kadeem this is
the amount of water he is sowing his
seeds he has water the people who
dependent upon the canal
they are agitated they’re in a hunger
strike even as we sit in this room
listening
the other irony is that the people when
they ran out of water they didn’t have
water in the canal they came to Chapel
sinks
khadeem and asked for water those people
are farmers who depend upon the canal
they came to the Hadean to get water so
there you have it
survival in a drought prone region
teaches us a few things primarily number
one which is not on this is listen to
the land listen to what the land says
but in city after city state after state
country after country everywhere in the
world people divorced from the land
sitting in ivory towers are making plans
for the land and when planning is
divorced from the land for the village
we get floods in Chennai we get droughts
in California which are supposed to be a
paradise ready we get droughts in
California we get dust balls in China
and the tragedy we get people dying in
Marathwada and this list is hardly
exhausted
one it does not include number will be
diluted and we all know what’s happening
here
we this year had record rainfall 1200
millimeters we normally get under the
under a thousand we got 1200 millimeters
but there’s no change in our groundwater
level there is no extra water
availability in fact literally water
water everywhere and not a doctor to get
this with the Sinkin we get 3 billion
liters per day of rain averaged over the
earth we consume 1.8 billion liters day
we get nearly double what we need from
the rain but clearly as even the desert
has shown us it’s not about how much we
get it’s about what we do
and what do we do with it even 15 years
ago
the wetlands of Agora Lake Belen dude
and Bert food are kind of connected by
wetlands we can see that and in 2017
what have we done
we have sucked it dry filled it up built
around it and now we defecate these
lakes are cut cut off from each other
they are not connected anymore in the
way they were they should be and what
are we getting
and then opposed this list of lakes the
lakes of camping out as Bangalore and
all his descendants it’s been converted
into layouts stadiums and bus stands
unit
that’s what we’ve done to our local
sources of water we have gone against
every one of those tenets of survival in
a drought prone region and we are at the
doctor
so what are we done with shut up local
sources of water we’ve defiled then we
have sucked up our reserves 400,000
borewells
sucked Carl and dry they’re still
sucking on land dry and we have relied
on a single source that are very so far
away and the government so where do we
go from here I know it’s all human doing
right now right not so not so that’s
what is and we all know there is the
frothing and the foaming of our lovely
lake and this is what candy and what
candy is not really very far away
that is jakku the community came
together the residence the locals
everybody’s come together they’re still
working to clean the slate make it
viable and that’s happening it quite a
few leagues around town you see
kappa gatta when he established this
city and all his descendants they knew
that Pangloss sits atop 3000 feet of
granite gneiss all the rain that falls
is unlikely to just go up they created
Lakes cascading Lakes they created
thousands of wells because they knew
that the denizens of the city will need
water and they need the provider if he
do not have a perennial source but we do
not have a perennial river running
Topanga and so they thought about that
they listened to the land they studied
the land they knew where to build the
lakes and they built it and it
functioned for hundreds of years
hundreds of times until
maybe 1950 when Bangalore began to boom
and then we started forgetting our local
sources of water we started depending on
just one reservoir then another
reservoir and then finally the river far
away we did not nurture our wells we
built over it we did not know to release
so I’m going to leave you with this what
if what if we as a community took a
pledge what if we
decided to join the efforts that are
reclaiming our lakes and our Commons
what if we began to resurrect our open
we’re going back to what the land is
telling us to do
and then closer to home many of us live
in things that look like this or have a
roof or have a terrace
I’m standing on a circle it may be one
meter by one meter if the 1200
millimeters of rain fell here I would
have that many liters of water to drink
right it’s just that much surely we have
a book that’s bigger than this
what if Bangalore we prepare now we have
to prepare now to collect the rain that
is going to fall in 20 what are people
prepared to collect every
[Applause]
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