Though it is located just 336 kilometers (209 miles) north of Raipur, Chhattisgarh’s bustling capital, it takes either a hard drive or an overnight train ride to reach this city of spice and crowds. Further on, 40 kilometers (25 miles) down a narrow heaving road of cracking asphalt, a high ridge of rock and forest lead west to Khondla Village.
Though official India is slow to recognize it, the path to this huge nation’s successful modernization leads through villages like Khondla.
During the last two years, BAIF (Bharatiya Agro Industries Foundation) — a respected Indian non-profit that specializes in rural development and was founded in 1967 by an associate of Mahatma Ghandi — has worked with Khondla’s rice farmers to design and develop an elegant, low-cost irrigation and water-conservation project. With a goal of recharging the area’s groundwater reservoirs, which local farmers say have been declining in recent years, the project has so far led to significantly larger harvests using check dams, small ponds, shallow channels, and gravity to capture the rainfall that pours off the surrounding ridge and distribute it to the village’s rice paddies.
One significant benefit is that Khondla’s farmers earn cash wages to build and manage the project. Another benefit is that farm incomes have grown with the increased yields and larger rice harvests.
Vjiyar Singh, the 45-year-old village president and a rice farmer who has spent all his life in Khondla, summed up the project, now in its third season, this way: “I get the opportunity to work on the field and get money from the field. The crop increased, so it’s good.”
In many ways, India is a study in cognitive dissonance, a fierce and frustrating struggle between what is really working in the country — especially in India’s 400,000 villages, like Khondla — and the mega-costly and complex industrial modernization that the national government’s leaders insist is the best path for the world’s second most populous nation. In other words, more than just 1,100 kilometers (700 miles) separate Khondla and New Delhi, India’s capital.
Recharge and Replenish
Here in northern Chhattisgarh, served by narrow roads, reliable trains, trustworthy electricity, and water supplies that fit the need, Khondla’s villagers work with an expert public interest group to shape available environmental and economic resources into a sustainable water-conservation and food production pilot project. The low-maintenance and highly effective project fits its time and place. With available labor, capital, and technology, the water conserving steps taken by Khondla recharges the water table, virtually eliminates runoff and water pollution, increases harvests, and improves the financial standing of 300 farm families.
The total cost of the 110-hectare (294-acre) pilot project, which started in 2010, is 797,000 rupees ($US 159,400). This year, Khondla’s farmers are expanding the check dams, culverts, and storage ponds to cover all of the village’s 856 hectares (2,100 acres) of farmland.
“The idea is to harvest the rainwater to irrigate and to recharge the groundwater,” said P.K. Tripathi, BAIF’s thematic program executive, who helped design the watershed development project. He points to #23 in a series of 36 small dams made from boulders, each dam numbered with yellow paint.
“The results have been very good,” Tripathi said. “The water table was at 50 meters (164 feet) deep when we started and going down more than a meter a year. Now it’s coming up.”
India’s capital, meanwhile, is a ferment of nation building and global competitive zeal. Though there is disagreement, many policymakers still look to the United States as a mature model of modern commerce. They also see China’s headstrong industrialization as a way to achieve it.
India’s 12th and newest Five-Year Plan (2012-2017) calls for expensive infrastructure projects in water supply, energy expansion, manufacturing development, and transportation — rebuilt irrigation systems, new factories, new power plants, larger coal mines, modernization of a substandard electric grid, expansion of the national rail transport network, and more urban subways. The goals are ambitious:
1. Keep annual economic growth above 7 percent.
2. Add tens of millions more citizens to the ranks of the middle class.
3. Achieve these objectives in a way that significantly reduces the harm that India’s growth is putting on its water, land, air, and mineral resources.
Whether India can come close to meeting these objectives is very much in doubt, according to authorities in and out of government. For instance, the national economy is growing this year at an annual rate of 4.8 percent, according to government figures released in July, which is the slowest pace in a decade. Economists blame declines in services and manufacturing. But a number of the nation’s top specialists in water resources, agriculture, and energy say that the nation’s endemic inefficiency in water use and energy production, and the country’s impenetrable bureaucracy are discouraging native entrepreneurs and foreign investment.
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