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India receives most of its rainfall in one go, once a year, in the form of the monsoon.
During the months of July, August and September, the monsoon progresses from the south to the north of India, often giving very heavy rainfall on the east side of the country.
By the time the monsoon rains reach Rajasthan, the amount of water they deliver has usually drastically diminished. In most years, between 100 and 500mm of rain falls in Rajasthan, but in some years the western desert areas receive practically no rain. Historically, 7 out of every 10 years have been drought years.
Occasionally, as in 2006, severe storms cause flooding, leading to widespread loss of lives and homes.
In the remote, barren and arid villages in rural India, communities are still struggling to survive without running water.
Their only options are to spend almost all their money on expensive unclean water, or send their women and girls to spend hours every day, fetching even worse water from far away wells.
Rajasthan is India’s most water-scarce state. We started this projects here many years ago, and Rajasthan remains the main focus of our work.
Rural villagers rely on agriculture, animal husbandry and forestry as mainstays of their livelihoods.
All these sources of livelihood depend on water and soil.
For their water, most rural communities still rely on rain.
They are at the mercy of the unreliable monsoon.
People supplement this precarious livelihood with ‘labour work’: low-paid work, often exploitative, usually a long way from home.
Traditionally, rural people survived with very little water.
They knew a lot about capturing and storing rainwater. Nowadays, however, the traditional wisdom is dying out as large-scale government-led schemes such as pipelines or water towers promise modern methods of water delivery.
Sadly, far from meeting rural communities’ water supply needs, these schemes tend to deliver infrequent, unreliable supplies (e.g. once per month). In the worst cases, they carry the precious resource of water away from rural areas to service growing urban centres.
Our projects aim to revive traditional knowledge and promote rainwater harvesting methods as a cost-effective, sustainable solutions that put villagers back in control of their water resources.
In many remote villages in Rajasthan, marginalised families struggle to sustain a regular and safe source of water for themselves, their essential animals, and their crops.
We enable families to capture monsoon rainwater in their homes and habitats, but once water is secured, they must make critical decisions about how to use it – should they feed the cattle or crops, or is there enough for both?
What will give them the best source of food and income?
