After independence, India invested heavily in modern infrastructure to extract and distribute water: large dams, canal networks and eventually electrified borewells. Inaugurating the Bhakra-Nangal canal system in 1954, Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru called such projects the temples of new India. But very little of that ambition went into putting the ever depleting groundwater back.
In recent years, though, policy has swung around. Building johads, tankas, baoris and kunds is part of the Indian government’s 2019 push to ensure every rural home has its own clean water tap. Another government programme has built 69,000 village ponds. Nationally, recharge from tanks, ponds and conservation structures rose from 14 billion cubic metres in 2017 to 25 billion in 2024.
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In 2020, the Indian government set out its master plan for artificial recharge, which aims to direct rainwater and runoff back into the ground to replenish depleted aquifers, rather than letting it drain away. Its vision includes construction of 14 million rainwater harvesting and recharge structures, capable of capturing 185 billion cubic metres of monsoon rainfall. Many of the structures it describes already exist, dug centuries ago by hand.
Before the village where Varsha, 67, lives dug a johad, her well would run inconsistently through the dry months. Now it holds water year-round, she says. Varsha never used to speak in her village assemblies, but now she has become a vocal advocate for the structures. What is needed now, she says, is regular desilting and more structures besides, so nobody depends on a single source.
In fact, the knowledge of how important tankas and nadis were was never really lost in communities, says Pratap Moharana, a scientist at India’s government desert research institution, the Central Arid Zone Research Institute (Cazri) in Jodhpur, because they often kept building them. What was lost was the political will to take it seriously.
Arun Krishnamurthy, the founder of the Environmentalist Foundation of India, part of the Moosi Rani Sagar stepwell restoration, has seen that gap from the inside. “No amount of money, technology or field effort can save stepwells,” he says, “unless there is a strong civic discipline”.
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