This piece is written in conjunction with India Water Week 2016.
Access to clean, safe, and secure water supplies in India (along with everywhere else in the world), is crucial to all types of planning – rural and urban development, environmental and health issues, poverty alleviation, and the biggest water consumer of them all, agriculture.
Last year, India’s Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation launched a new program called Jal Kranti Abhiyan (or Water Movement Initiative) to improve water access to villages across India.
Their main objective is to strengthen grassroots involvement and promote at the village-level, adoption of both traditional and modern knowledge and practices for water resource conservation. The Indian government has gathered together NGOs, educational institutions, policymakers and citizens to participate in this initiative in order to raise awareness about the issue.
They began by selecting two of the most water-scarce villages or jal grams in the majority of districts in each state (to give you an idea, the coastal state of Tamil Nadu has 32 districts, and out of them 25 have been selected or 50 jal grams) in order to implement their pilot programs. These programs are mainly capacity-building in nature with workshops and seminars to educate communities in addition to utilization of various forms of print, traditional, and digital media. The Jal Gram program also looks to select and train two water professionals in each jal gram - a female and a male - to share knowledge with other villages as well as their fellow community members.
The training can range from learning how to construct rainwater harvesting structures including johads and jalkunds (retention ponds), to creating katas (mud dams), and drip irrigation systems constructed from bamboo and bicycle pumps. Microirrigation, spring rejuvenation and waste water recycling have also been cited.
The Indian government’s aim is to start out small with the hopes that this will turn into a mass movement, as S.K. Sharma, of the Ministry of Water Resources explained at a session from India Water Week. They will offer around 14 lakh for each jal gram to conduct participatory research in the hopes that these villages will become path breakers, as Amita Prasad also of the Ministry of Water Resources mentioned. But the funding itself with come from existing schemes from the national and state governments including Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana (PMKSY), the Mahathma Ghandi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and the Accelerated Irrigation Benefits Programme (AIBP).
The question that remains is whether capacity building programs like these will take off in the years to come. With climate change-induced drought becoming more frequent, will Jal Kranti Abhiyan turn into the mass movement of citizen-started mobilization toward water security that the Indian government is looking for?
For more information on improving rural water security in India through the PMKSY initiatve, check out the film: When Every Drop Counts (15 min)
