Normal people like us take all the natural resources available to us for granted. We assume that everything available to us are going to be there for ever and don't even think about having the resources conserve kept available for future generations to come.
But hope is not lost when people like Rajendra Singh is around.
He is a hero in the state of Rajasthan. A water conservationist from Alwar district in Rajasthan, Rajendra Singh is known to have revived five rivers that had been dried up for years. In the 1940s, at a very young age, he observed that the population of his district was reducing as most villagers had moved over to other areas after the local Arvari River dried up. This gave him a strong desire to help his people in the village and the only way this could be done was to bring back water to those villages. It was his pure intelligence that helped him to devise a strategy. He introduced the concept of ‘johads’. These are rainwater storage tanks built with any materials available such as stones, dirt and concrete.
These johads were built on streams that flowed into the river so that it could replenish both ground and surface water levels. He also built ‘check dams’ across streams to improve the downstream flow. Initially, his strategy did not work, but he did not give up hope. He kept on building dams and tanks for two years and eventually his concept was a success. The water gathered in the johads during the monsoons gradually rejuvenated crops and vegetation in the villages. Aquifers were refilled for local drinking water. The retention capacity of water in the soil also increased. Arvari River came back to life. Four other dried up rives also came back to life and the villagers who had left came back and got back their traditional way of life. He started his NGO ‘Tarun Bharat Sangh’ (TBS) in 1970. He has fought against slow bureaucracy, mining lobby and has helped his people to take charge of water management. His NGO has so far helped build over 8,600 johads and brought water back to over 1,000 villages. His exceptional work has given him the nickname ‘Waterman of India’. He has also been awarded various awards, the most popular being the Stockholm Water Prize, an award known as ‘the Nobel Prize for water’, in 2015. In 2008, The Guardian magazine named him amongst its list of “50 people who could save the planet”.
And we should not take him for granted too. We need to learn from him, and support such people and put all our efforts to conserve our nature.
INCREDIBLE WORK... INCREDIBLE BHARATHIYA
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