How Tarun Bharat Sangh revived Johad tradition

On the night of 2nd October 1985, when I got down at the last stop of the bus at Bheekampura Alwar district, Rajasthan with four of my friends, we only had a single agenda, which was ‘to fight injustice against the people.’

And we only knew one way to do it, by spreading literacy in the villages. So we promptly started a literacy drive.

But the people suffered from a severe scarcity of water.

The region that once sustained the eco-system of the ‘Aravalli’ had become barren. It was difficult to find young people in the villages, all of them had fled in search of employment, and women trudged long distances to fetch a mere pot full of water. Crops failed regularly, lack of vegetation led to soil degradation; monsoon runoff washed away the topsoil.

I remember there was not a single blade of grass in the region and we often stumbled on the carcass of cattle. Barely 3 per cent of cultivable area was irrigated. Life was difficult and hardship endless.

One day, Mangu Patel, the wise old man of this village told me, “we do not want your literacy, we want Water.” But where was the water? I did not know anything about water.

Mangu explained to me about the rich tradition existing in this region of building ’Johads,’ which were a prime example of the ingenuity of inexpensive simple traditional technology that was quite remarkable in terms of recharging groundwater of the entire region.

‘Johads’ are simple mud and concave shaped barriers built across the slope to arrest the rainwater runoff with a high embankment on three sides while the fourth side is left open for the water to enter.

The height of the embankment is such that the capacity of the ‘Johad’ is more than the volume of runoff coming from the catchment based on a rough estimation of maximum possible runoff that could come into it. Therefore, the height varies from one ‘Johad’ to another, depending on the site, water flow and pressure etc.

In some cases to ease the water pressure, a masonry structure called ‘Afra’ is also made for the outlet of excess water.

The water storage area varies from two hectares to a maximum of 100 hectares.

Water collected in a ‘Johad’ during monsoon penetrates into the sub-soil. This recharges the groundwater and improves the soil moisture in vast areas, mostly downstream.

The groundwater can be drawn from traditional open wells, built and maintained by the villagers themselves without any input from outside. As the percolation process takes some time, depending on the soil, depth of water etc.

during this temporary period (sometimes several months), the water in the ‘Johad’ is directly used for irrigation, drinking needs of animals, and other domestic purposes.

The advantages of this structure is that apart from arresting and storing rainwater, it checks soil erosion, mitigates floods, and ensures water availability in wells even for several successive drought years, like we had here in the last five years.

Also, during the dry season when the water gradually recedes in the Johad, the land inside the Johad itself becomes available for cultivation.

This land receives periodically good silt and moisture, and that allows growing crops without any irrigation. So the Johad does not take away valuable arable land from cultivation.

The distinctiveness of this structure is that it is based on simple and cheap technology with locally available resources, mostly labour and soil, and sometimes when necessary, stones, sand and lime, all locally available. All the estimations are based on the villagers experience and intuition, without any physical measurements.

When I went to Bheekampura in 1985, this unique traditional water management system was still alive in the collective memory of the people remained alienated from the global environment.

On the advice by Mangu Patel, we became a catalyst to building ‘Johads’ the local authorities were dead against us as we bypassed all bureaucratic channels and dealt with the people directly to fulfil their requirements in the manner they decided.

The first ‘Johad’ took three years to build, in the fourth year we built 50 ‘Johads,’ in the fifth we built almost 100; in 2001 we built around 1,000 water structures.

In total, we built nearly 9,000 water harvesting structures in more than 1,000 villages.

Today, there are 11,600 water harvesting structures in 1,280 villages, across an area of 12,800 km2. Due to these structures, 2,50,000 wells have been recharged, and are now full with water even during summertime. The seven rivers are now flowing perennially.

When we started working, our area was classified by the government as ‘dark zone’, it means with severe water shortage and the water level had receded to difficult depths.

The same area after 10 years was classified as ‘white zone’, which means underground water level are satisfactory and it does not need attention from the government.

No engineer was called for consultation; we were guided entirely by the traditional wisdom of the people who have maintained the ecological balance for generations.

These water structures were built with the active participation of the community in its construction from identification of the site to the designing of the structure and by contribution in the cost of its construction and latter in its maintenance, which ensured that all the structures were need based.

As a result, water became abundant; more water meant better crops, better conditions of soil, time for the girls to go to schools, and rich community life. It helped forestation in the area and development of wildlife.

(The writer is a well-known water conservationist from Alwar district in Rajasthan. He won several awards like Stockholm Water Prize, which is known as "the Nobel Prize for Water," in 2015. Previously, he also won the Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership in 2001 for his pioneering work in community-based efforts in water harvesting and water management. He runs an NGO called 'Tarun Bharat Sangh.')