Water rejuvenation and importance of grassroots engagement
As I mentioned in an earlier LinkedIn post, we at OVBI are working hard to address rural India’s water challenges through the JalTara initiative. The goal of JalTara is to solve rural water challenges at scale— by digging standard recharge pits in every plot of land in a village.
One of the learnings from our MVP 4-village project in 2021 was that farmer engagement and trust is critical for success. We realized that pushback mainly came from villagers who we were not able to engage in any meaningful manner. With Covid making gatherings hard to organize, we had to scramble to complete the project — and we felt if we had put more effort into early communication, we likely would have been able to dig more than the 1400 pits we finally did.
We are now in the process of a larger 50 village JalTara project, with a goal to dig over 30,000 recharge pits by June of 2022— and for the first few months all we are doing is talking to the villagers. The JalTara team, led by the immensely capable Purushottam Wayal, have been visiting every single village; holding daily engagement sessions with the villagers. This has been invaluable in educating them, learning about their issues as well as clarifying their responsibilities in solving their own water challenges.
We started the 50 village project on January 1st, 2022. And we will continue the education and engagement till the end of March. The months of April and May will be a massive sprint — with a goal to dig 30,000+ recharge pits across those 50 villages, in about 60 days before the monsoons arrive. The response from the villages have been fantastic and this investment in engagement will pay its dividends as we race towards completion before the rains.
The 50 village project is an opportunity to learn how to scale JalTara — and villager engagement is a critical part of this learning. This will help us meet the JalTara vision of one recharge pit in every plot of land in a village.
And in 5 years scale up to dig a 100 million of these recharge pits spread across 100,000 villages — in order to gain an extra thirty trillion liters of water every year.
