Kevin Cook
On Thursday October 9th Om
Prakash Sharma, the Director of the Wells for India Office in Udaipur,
Rajasthan, took time out from a busy schedule of meetings to visit the
University of Northampton to talk to first and second year geographers and
international development students.
The first year geographers had
been set the task of raising the funds to enable the charity to provide 22 biosand filters for families
living in a village in the Thar desert in Rajasthan. Each filter costs £30 and
by carrying out tasks such as selling Wells for India Christmas cards, making
cakes or simply asking for donations, they hope to raise the £660 for the
project to proceed. Working in teams, they will be contributing to the
university’s social responsibility agenda.
Om chose to concentrate on two
main ideas in his illustrated talk to second year students. Firstly he
contrasted the top-down, large scale approaches to providing water with small
scale, community focused projects. Using the massive Indira Gandhi canal as an
example, he showed that, whilst it has irrigated many thousands of hectares, it
has also bypassed the poorest desert villages providing drinking water mainly
for urban areas.
Referring to the work of Wells
for India, Om emphasised the urgent need to return to the traditional water
harvesting techniques used throughout Rajasthan for many thousands of years. He
blamed large scale approaches such as the Indira Gandhi canal for downgrading
schemes such as taankas leading to the ancient technologies almost being lost.
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A single family taanka in the Thar Desert
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These two themes are an
important part of Wells for India’s philosophy. The charity works with the
poorest of the poor at the village level and is providing the funding to
construct hundreds of water harvesting projects in three contrasting areas of
Rajasthan. In the Aravali Hills region it is using gully plugs and anicuts to
increase water recharge and raise water tables. In the Thar desert it is
constructing taankas and beris to store monsoon rainfall and thus reduce the
distance women have to walk to get their water. In the Sambhar salt lake region
it is installing roof water harvesting systems.
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Fields of wheat in
the Aravali Hills made possible
following the construction of check dams across
the valley
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The university is most
grateful to Om for joining us for an afternoon. For more information about the
charity and about Om’s work in Rajasthan visit the Wells for India website.
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| Om and Kevin |
