Dying wisdom
the year 1979 had seen a debilitating drought sweep across India. As rains failed, agricultural production dropped, resulting in enormous human misery. Nestled in the denuded sub-Himalayan Shivalik hills, the poor villagers of Sukhomajri in Haryana were not spared either. They had managed to grow just one monsoon crop a year in normal circumstances; this year, they were not going to get even that.
However, even in this desolate landscape, there was a ray of hope. P R Mishra, a soil conservationist who was trying to get the villagers to stop grazing their animals in the region's degraded watershed, had earlier in the year worked with them to build a small earthen dam across the seasonal stream that ran through Sukhomajri. Desperate for the water stored behind the dam, the villagers appealed to the soil conservationist to help them make channels for conveying the water to their fields. But before giving his assent, Mishra told the villagers that if they did not stop grazing their cattle in the watershed now, their own dam would get silted up very fast and they would not have this water when the next drought hit the village. The villagers agreed to take care of the watershed. Thus, good water management through small water harvesting tanks gave birth to a pioneering village-based natural resource management system which has since inspired many Indian environmentalists and village workers. Today, the village has several such water harvesting structures and can grow three crops a year regularly. From an essentially food-importing village, it has become a food-exporting one. And with grass productivity increasing and trees regenerating, the region now has so much fodder that the villagers have given up their goats in favour of high-yielding buffaloes; they sell several lakhs of rupees worth of milk to neighbouring towns. Says economist Gopal Kadekodi at the Institute of Economic Growth in New Delhi, "The rate of return from this project cannot be matched even by the corporate sector.'
Around the same time, in the mid-'70s, a jeep driver in the Indian army had returned to his parched village, Ralegan Siddhi, in the drought-prone district of Ahmednagar in Maharashtra. Faced with intensive land degradation, denudation and dried-up water sources, the village had fallen victim to massive male migration, rampant illicit liquor brewing and heavy alcoholism. Krishna Bhaurao Hazare, the jeep driver, took a decision which was to change the face of his village. He began organising the people for constructing small dams across the various seasonal channels that went through and around the village, so that every drop of rain could be harvested and allowed to percolate into the soil to enrich the groundwater reserves. With the help of the increasing groundwater, the villagers slowly began improving their agriculture by using water-conserving crops. In the last two decades, the dramatic change in the economy of Ralegan Siddhi has made it a model village, attracting nationwide attention. Krishna Bhaurao, who has also become a leading crusader against government corruption at the grassroot level, is popularly known today as Anna (