The Wells of Tamil Nadu

The Wells of Tamil Nadu Peter Stokes - Short Stories R FOUNDATION The Wells of Tamil Nadu The Wells Of Tamil Nadu Most of the world’s great civilisations grew up around rivers; think of the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Ganges, the Yellow River, the Pearl, the Tiber, the Danube, the Loire, the Hudson, the Mersey or the Thames. Or the Manchester Ship Canal. Tamil Nadu’s great rivers, the Kavery and Vaigai have watered the fertile plains of southern India for thousands of years, but they didn’t look very impressive in November, even after months of rain. Local people regarded them as being in full flood. In a few months they will be completely dried out. The monsoon rains were wrecking the important salt pans on the Bay of Bengal coast and washing the roads away before our eyes, but still not providing the water to meet the people’s needs. If water were spread uniformly across the globe, everyone would have plenty. New Delhi gets only forty days of rain a year. The water table beneath Beijing has fallen 200 feet in the last twenty years. China has forty times the population of Canada, but less water. India has twenty percent of the world’s population, but four percent of the world’s water. Even in the biggest cities the poorest residents can spend hours in queues at standpipes or waiting for a tanker to arrive, in temperatures above one hundred degrees. To supplement these unreliable supplies a high proportion of household income goes on bottled water. Government water specialists (we met them at the office of the Chief Water Engineer of Tamil Nadu in Madurai) say they are connecting big population centres first, but water supply in big cities 1 is so fragile that it will be years, maybe a generation, before remote villages are connected to piped pure drinking water. And maybe never. Tamil Nadu gets about the same rainfall each year as the United Kingdom, about 900mm each year.* While rainfall in Britain is fairly evenly distributed throughout the year, 90% of Tamil Nadu’s rain falls from June to November, with the south-west and north-east monsoons. The countryside was vividly and sublimely green, my, and Hollywood’s vision of paradise, sugar and banana plantations, cotton fields, eucalyptus and teak forests, mangoes, acacias, coconut groves, with extensive stretches of water covering the rice paddies and floodplains. Some of this water is managed, to irrigate crops. Some is collected in reservoirs or ‘tanks’. These tanks may be small domestic assets or as big as a football pitch. Where you find a temple you’ll find a tank, since water is needed for ritual purification. Often there is a coconut grove as well, (a coconut, the tufty end on fire, is used as a temple offering) the temple, the water and the lofty coconut trees offering a golden photo opportunity. Some of the water is harvested for drinking water. “That tank is pure water for drinking,” local people will say proudly. (Their idea of drinking water is probably not yours or mine. At one spring-fed pond we watched local women using their saris, placed over the neck of their water bottles, to filter the in-rushing water, which was dusty, a little scummy, and contained plentiful insect life. There were cowpats and other evidence of animal life around the pond. In the dry season, they told us, it takes an hour or two to fill the water bottle, cupful by cupful.) Many of the tanks are decayed, silted over, overgrown with vegetation, or hardly more than muddy pools. There was a 2 magnificent tank (and a temple) a couple of hundred metres from our hotel in Karaikudi. A carpet of lilies bloomed prolifically at the centre of the water, encircled by a carpet of garbage. It was a breeding ground for swarms of huge dragonflies and other less attractive creatures. Some tanks and wells, constructed under the Raj, have dried out. Nobody can quite say why. Maybe soil geology or chemistry has changed in a hundred years. Now these impressive stonewalled, square tanks provide homes for interesting but lethal snakes. Many villages have a concrete overhead tank (OHT) as a central feature. Originally it would have used mains electricity to pump water from a borewell up into the tank for community use. Now they are mostly useless. Either the water is saline, because the well was drilled in the wrong place, or the well is too shallow, due to corruption or incompetence. Or the electricity supply functions for only ten minutes each day, unpredictably, so one villager has to spend the whole watchful day beside the tap, and tries to fill as many vessels as possible when the water does flow. The women of Africa, it has been estimated, spend 400 billion hours each year collecting water. (That is roughly equivalent to the number of hours, per year, that Europeans spend in the workplace.) There must be a similar figure for India. Americans consume roughly 500 litres of water per person per day. Europeans about half that. India’s water engineers estimate the needs of the people of Tamil Nadu at 40 litres per capita per diem, (pcpd), but in the remote villages people are managing on a quarter of that. I don’t think I ever saw a man carrying water. It’s the task of the women and children and we see them everywhere. Next time you have a little time on your hands fill a bucket with 18 or 20 litres of water and carry it on your head for a mile or two. 20 litres of water weighs an astonishing (and to me exhausting) 44 pounds. Some 3 women told us that they spend two hours a day collecting drinking water, walking 2km or more each way, to and from a reliable source. Some said three or four hours each day. And this is just the time spent on drinking/cooking water. Each family may need an additional 60 or 100 litres of poorer quality water each day, drawn from a closer source, for washing themselves and their clothes and for animals. (When they are not gathering water the women and children gather wood for fuel, huge bundles carried, for miles, like water, on their heads.) In two weeks we covered 2,500 miles between Kovelpatti and Tiruchirappali, between Madurai and the east coast, mostly in the districts of Sivaganga and Puddukottai. We inspected the five wells already constructed and talked to the women about the change that the new wells brought. Now, the women say, the installation of a Kamla Foundation borewell a few yards from their front door means that only a few minutes are spent each day fetching pure, safe drinking water. (In fact the last, fifth, well, at Naraikudi was not yet in use. The well has been bored out, the rig still present, but the heavy rains in the second week turned the site to bright red liquid mud, and delayed the laying of the concrete base. So we paddled around in the mud, and shared the pleasure of anticipation with the local villagers, but not the inauguration ceremony.) And we scouted for ten new wells, to be installed this year, talking to village councils and local community workers, and trying, in the midst of so much desperate need, to use a rational formula to install the new wells where they will benefit the most people. I did a back of envelope calculation. The five Kamla Foundation wells installed since 2010 serving about 5000 families, will, at a conservative estimate, save 1,000,000 hours of women’s time and 4 labour, in their first year of operation. An immense amount of energy preserved for childcare, education, or productive work. And how many lives preserved? Globally, there have been more deaths from completely preventable waterborne diseases than from war, since 1945. “The trouble with India,” said my new friend, “is that we have no drains.” He was a young teacher of mathematics, who stopped off at Kumar’s Coffee Shop And Bakery, just around the corner from the hotel, every evening on his way home from work. He also owned the cybercafé on the second floor across the road. We were sitting in Kumar’s watching the rain come down, and the main road, a four-lane highway, disappearing under 10 inches of bright red water. The next morning the bath-sized potholes in the road were still full of red water. We are all aware of India Shining, the world’s biggest democracy, the astonishing technological development and economic growth, but India is also a collapsed civilisation, a failed state, and not only for the poor. Even in the major northern cities in middle class neighbourhoods water supply can be intermittent and undrinkable. The Romans built their Empire on drains and aqueducts. India is still reliant on the plastic bottle. But there are a growing number of villages in Tamil Nadu, where the drinking water is assured. I’ve seen them. * But Wales gets twice as much. 1800mm falls in the Elan and Claerwen valleys. Almost exactly a hundred years ago the first stage of the massive engineering project to supply Birmingham with 600 million litres of drinking water per day was completed, the 5 water flowing by force of gravity 120kms into the reservoirs on the west side of the city. 6 WATER WARS Film lovers everywhere remember the saga of Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources. It is the story of a battle for water, and one small farmer’s cruelty to another in the harsh hot Provencal hills.

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