Jal Samvardhan
Jhabua is not short of rain. It is short of anything to hold the rain. Bare hills send it straight off the slope, so the villages set about building the district somewhere to keep it.
Water is the predominant stress on the tribal community of Jhabua, and it sets a whole cycle of trouble in motion — of which the compulsion to migrate is only the most visible part. Reckless deforestation left the hills bare; bare hills mean heavy surface runoff, and runoff means the rain never sinks in. A large share of those who hold agricultural land get one crop a year from it.
The youth of Jhabua, empowered through the training camps, took a pledge to quench the thirst of Mother Earth. They revived their own tradition of Halma and began making Shankar Jata — structures to hold water where it falls. That is how the Jal Andolan began.
‘Gaon-gaon me jayenge, Shankar Jata banayenge.’
We will go village to village, and we will build Shankar Jata. The slogan the Jal Andolan was carried on — the matted locks of Shiva, which in the telling catch the river before it can wash the earth away.
Every structure here was sited by the villagers who would use it, and built by the people who live above it.
Talab — built by Halma, in the dry months
Every year during Gram Engineering training, villagers identify the sites where water can be held. They then do Halma to build the reservoirs through the dry summer months, before the rain arrives to fill them.
Built after the monsoon, used immediately
Alongside the reservoirs, smaller works recharge the groundwater: hand pump recharging, bori bandhan and contour trenching. These are one-time structures, built after the monsoon rain, and they let a village hold water for immediate use rather than watching it run off.
Kheda village — 100 hectares treated
Under the Watershed Development Project supported by NABARD, Shivganga treated 100 hectares of land in Kheda village. The labour came through Shivganga’s own network of volunteers, who built:
Talab built
Small water structures
Contour trenches
Join this mass movement to save your share of water.
DonateHold the rain and the forest can come back, the second crop becomes possible, and the reason to leave for the season falls away. The rest of the work in Jhabua stands on this.
