WHAT WE LEARNT FROM OUR FIRST TALK OF THE ELIMINATING WATER POVERTY SERIES

This week, we kicked off our Live Series on Eliminating Water Poverty with the leadership team of OVBI: Mr. Satej Chaudhary, President, OVBI, Mr. Mohan Trikha, Chairman, OVBI Water, and BV Jagadeesh, Co-Chair, OVBI Water. It was an inspiring discussion, where we were reminded of the problems that we are trying to solve, and why we embarked upon our vision of eliminating water poverty in India by 2030. We also reinforced our guiding philosophy, our belief, that to eradicate poverty in India, one needs to eliminate the poverty of water. Once that basic essential is taken care of, a huge part of the problem is dealt with.

If you missed it, you can still catch the discussion on our Youtube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5ueMQTbAYk

Here’s what we learnt from the talk, briefed below in the words of our esteemed speakers.

We learnt about the crisis:

Primarily, India’s geography is such that most of Central and Southern India depend on rainwater for sustenance. In an ideal situation, it rains, and rainwater goes into the underground aquifers, and it is this water that seeps in the underground tanks or underground natural aquifers that sustains life for the rest of the year. However, that’s not what’s happening in India.

In older days, one had to drill 50 feet, and one would get water. Now, in some areas, it’s not available till you dig 800 feet. On top of this, there’s much lack of awareness. As you go deeper into the ground, the water gets more contaminated with heavy metals. Result: 80% of India doesn’t have drinking water. 80% of India’s rural population doesn’t have running water in their homes. 85% of India’s water is used by Agriculture and all the rainwater, the freshwater that nature gives, almost 80% of it flows back to the sea.

We learnt about the reasons for the crisis:

Essentially the water crisis put in one sense is that our underground tanks are running dry. We’re pulling out too much water, and we’re not replenishing the underground aquifers enough. So, why is it that we’re not replenishing?

1. Chemical Farming: A soil that is organic, that is alive, behaves like a sponge. So when it rains, it holds a lot of water and pushes it underground; thereby naturally recharging the underground tanks. But, chemical farming has made the soil very hard and impervious
2. Water-hungry and cash-hungry Crops: We are in this situation where we do not have water and whatever water we have, we extract it and utilize it for cash-hungry, and water-hungry crops and we export those crops out. So we’re really exporting water in large quantities
3. Huge mismanagement: India has 4% of the World’s water, and 16% of its population. So right from the start, we are at the short end of the stick. And even with 4%, we have issues. India extracts more groundwater than China and the US combined. India gets the same amount of rain it used to, however, it falls in buckets, in large quantity, in a much shorter period. So we are looking at extreme events like either floods or droughts
4. Deforestation: Would you believe India has less than 28 trees per person? The same country had 200 trees at the time of partition 75 years ago. The United States has 400 trees per person. Canada has 4,500 trees per person

We learnt about our approach:

We had both a top-down approach and a bottom-up approach. One of our volunteers, Mr Datta Patil, actually went to his village, implemented things with his own hands and we learned a lot through that experience so that was the bottom-up approach. We also took the top-down approach where we partnered with some of our most organized NGOs in India, worked with top Geo-Scientists and working at a big scale across hundreds of villages. After these three-four years, we see that as NRIs sitting halfway across the globe, they’re really three things that we could do that can really help accelerate the change:

1. Funds: Without it, nothing really moves. That is primary
2. Technology: Most of the NGOs that are working in the space do not use technology to the potential, they could. And we come in here, to let them know of the opportunity that exists
3. Partnerships: The challenges that we’re talking about are humongous, and it’s not really possible for anyone organization to solve them. It’s critical for multiple organizations to come together and work in synergy
4. Building trust: A farmer who’s living on the bare thread cannot risk change. If you ask them to change something, he thinks, “what if something goes wrong.” He’s left nowhere. So we have to create build a trust level and communicate with them

We learnt about our Interventions:

Science of solving the water crisis is Integrated Watershed Management. Based on the geography, geology soil types amount of rain that the region receives, the interventions change. In fact, our geoscientists from ISRO who are spearheading our whole initiative told us that India can be broken down to nine agro-climatic zones and the intervention in each one of them are a little bit different. It’s obvious that what works in Rajasthan will not work in Karnataka.

Broadly speaking what we do is the short-term interventions which are the artificial recharge structures that we construct, so that the water that flows, goes underground. To stop the flow of water, or slow it down as it flows down, we create check dams and recharge wells water structures. Also, any water bodies which exists in the villages, we increase its capacity and ensure the water permeates into the ground. And second is a more long-term intervention, where we work with vegetation and organic farming so that we can create a sponge layer which absorbs water and recharges the aquifers. Also, a very key part of the long term intervention is forestation. Trees have the ability when it rains to take the water into the ground. The trees also create an environment by which there is more rain, and is more manageable, i.e. it is slow.

We learnt about the funding aspect of it all:

Raising funds is a very integrated aspect of all our projects. For the donors, it’s very important to get the assurance that the money is being put to use in the most efficient manner. They want to know, how can they get the maximum ROI for every dollar they are donating? For that, transparency and trust is fundamental for us.

You must know that OVBI itself is a 501 3c charitable organization in the United States. The money we collect is tax-deductible. Secondly, it is recognized by a lot of corporations where matching funds can be given. So if you contribute $100 towards it, your corporation can give you another $100 to make it $200.

To make everything totally transparent, we channel this money through our trusted distribution network. Our partners have to give us a certificate of full utilization. Also, we only do what is called milestone-based payments. In other words, we have an understanding up front, where we calculate the intervention amounts. We will not fund a particular project 100 per cent. We will go no more than 30 of the total required funding and ensure that everything is a milestone. We only do direct funding, there is no overhead funding.

We revisited our motivation: what makes us go on?

The first thing is commitment, the enthusiasm that was shown by our teams, and the ability to go through things despite the number of challenges they were facing. It was just phenomenal to see that we’re building leaders who are going to take things to a whole new level. The second thing was the skill. For example, we came across a lady, a single woman with just two acres of farm, who received an award from the Chief Minister as being one of the most progressive farmers. In Jalna, they’ve created more than 125 entrepreneurs after our interventions. In Karnataka, they’ve partnered with the Digital India initiative and these people who worked with us under our water projects are now ensuring that the government schemes actually reach the last mile. We look at the success of Halgara and we compare their growth to a start-up and see the productivity increase of this village. It is phenomenal what they’ve done in just three years. Some of the homes we went into, they didn’t have space to store the grain. They were sleeping on top of the sugar cane cakes. A village of just 2000–3000 people, they have so much food, a hospital, roads, health care, and there’s water everywhere. In fact, people have come back from the cities, back to the village to be able to do things. They’re putting in water conservation drip irrigation systems and we even saw sugar cane which used to be only six feet tall, and now was 25 feet tall with two inches diameter, just because of the water availability. The economic impact is huge and transformational. The confidence of the people and their health was in splendid shape. Can you believe that one-acre yield of sugarcane went up from 20 tons to 80 tons?

What you can perhaps learn from us?

Being involved with OVBI and its projects is absolutely infectious for all of us. Everyone has a full-time job, and they still contribute an enormous amount of their time, besides contributing money. The greatest advantage that we all see is the fact that you get to actually visit places that you would have never ever imagined, to the remotest places in India.

We’d like to welcome the audience and everyone to take some kind of a part in this organization. Everyone who’s listening (reading) here, spread the message, come and be volunteers of the organization. Adopt a village, adopt a farmer, get back to your village you will have a transformational change in their life.

We are hosting conversations with individuals transforming the lives of millions of people across the world through their water intervention projects. We hope to inspire you to join us in transforming lives by Eliminating Water Poverty. Join us here: https://www.eliminatingwaterpoverty.org/liveseries