JalTara — The Promise of Enough Water

54% of India is under extreme water stress.

The main reason is that only a small percentage of the annual monsoon rainwater seeps underground to replenish its natural aquifers. In fact, 78% of annual monsoon rain just flows into the ocean — and India only stores 6% of annual rainfall in reservoirs.

Consequently, women have to walk miles to procure water, farmers live in deep financial distress, and major cities such as Chennai are running out of water.

We absolutely can solve this water crisis. But only if we can collect and store trillions of liters from the monsoon in underground aquifers all across India.

In my view, we get to trillions of liters stored — not by executing a few large and complex water projects, but very large numbers of tiny, simple water projects.

And this concept is the genesis of the JalTara vision.

The JalTara approach is to dig simple recharge pits (or recharge pipes), at the lowest point in every available plot of land in villages all over India — to allow rainwater to bypass the dense, impervious topsoil and get a direct “pipe” to flow underground.

Now coming back to how we plan to solve the water challenge for the whole of India.

The JalTara goal is to dig over 100 million such small recharge pits (or pipes) across 100,000 of the most drought-hit villages in India. And thus store an additional thirty trillion liters of rainwater every year.

Farmer in Jalna explaining how the recharge pit in his plot not only created water capacity but also saved his soybean crops from spoilage

This past summer, in order to validate this “large numbers of tiny projects” approach, OVBI and IAHV worked together on a small four-village MVP experiment in Jalna, one of the most drought-hit regions of Maharashtra. Before the monsoon rains arrived, and in spite of Covid challenges, we were able to dig about 1400 simple recharge pits across nearly a thousand acres of land in these four villages.

I was privileged to spend a few days in those four villages recently — and I observed first-hand the benefits of the JalTara “recharge pit in every plot” methodology.

• Increased water capacity — A significant increase in the water table was visually apparent to all the villagers. They also mentioned that wells that normally took about 4–6 months to fill up to capacity have now filled up within a couple of months.
• Reduced flooding — After a very heavy thunderstorm, plots would normally remain flooded and underwater for 15 days or so — spoiling crops that had been planted. However, with a JalTara recharge pit at the plot’s lowest point, the water drained quickly, and the fields were clear within a few days. Farmers excitedly talked about how their soybean and onion crops were saved from spoilage.
• Multiple crops per year — With the increased availability of water, farmers are now planning two or even three crops this season. This improves land productivity and provides significant economic benefits for the farmers and their families.
• Scalability and virality — The farmers feel a sense of ownership of the projects since the recharge pits are on “their land”. And since farmers have experienced the benefits themselves, they are excited to help neighboring villagers. This sense of ownership and willingness to pay it forward will be the most important factor in scaling up the JalTara project.

With this four village MVP, we have validated that small, six to seven feet deep recharge pipes across thousands of plots can provide significant benefits in increased water capacity as well as reduced flooding.

The results are so promising that we are now expanding the JalTara project to fifty villages next year.

Our goal with the expanded fifty-village project for 2022 is to learn how we can scale rapidly — so we can tackle one thousand villages the year after (in 2023) and develop a plan to dig 100+ million JalTara recharge pipes across 100,000 villages within five years.

Thirty trillion liters — here we come!