back to india!

I’m excited to get back to India, especially as I sit in Germany (which I love), with every part of myself frozen completely. It has been worse than cold every day since I arrived. My feet are numb from the walk to the pub where I am writing this while drinking an even colder weiss bier. Why not coffee I ask myself…well, in Germany one does as the Germans do. Besides that, I don’t really need a reason to drink beer in the middle of the day- I think I must have some German in me.

I have decided for this trip to India, my question will be, what potential for change is there in this system? It’s a lofty question, as I still do not know all the problems. What I do know is that the second most populated country in the world has a mixture of every single water problem known, in varying degrees, in some areas one problem but not others, in some places all the problems, and the poor are ALWAYS disproportionately affected. To be really honest, I have asked myself why I care. Do the problems of India have any effect on us in America? Do the children who die everyday without any of us ever knowing them matter? Do we spend even a moment of weariness when millions of women are walking for miles every morning to secure the water for the day in buckets on her back? Do we have thirst on the days many people in India aren’t able to have any water? Do we get sick when people are forced to retrieve drinking water from the Ganges- one of the most polluted rivers on earth? Physically, no, none of this matters to us. But perhaps emotionally, we have the latent capacity to bring about change. This matters to me because the suffering of others is not unimportant to me, and I don’t think it’s unimportant to you. You have only to look at the response of the people around the world to the earthquake in Haiti to see that the problems of others do matter. The water problems in India are a disaster, not entirely natural, but a disaster none-the-less. Thousands of people die around the world everyday, not from buildings falling on them when the earth moves, but from water, a resource that we totally and completely take for-granted.

It isn’t a foregone conclusion that there is no hope. There is a man named Rajendra Singh, formally a biologist, in Rajasthan (the desert region in western India near Pakistan) that taught himself traditional water-harvesting techniques, once a dying wisdom in India, (thanks to the so-called advanced western cultures that formally looked to colonize it), that knows there is hope. With the help of local communities, he has installed what are called check dams and taken communities from being in a water deficit to having a positive water supply. He recognized that the western notion of supplying water wasn’t a viable option for the communities in which he worked. When your entire water supply comes from the twice-yearly monsoons, perhaps you should work with nature instead of against it (purely a western idea). They built reservoirs in the path of the monsoon water flow and worked with nature to slow the path of the water, allowing more to seep into the ground, thereby raising the water table, and stored the surface water behind check dams to use later. His work in India had changed communities from being those that are forced to send families away to work to those that grow their own food, sale extra at the markets, and use only a minimal amount of groundwater. For his work he has won the Magsaysay Award in 2001 (Asian equivalent of the Nobel prize) and more importantly, given people hope. I hope to get some time with him when I get to India.

So there is potential for change in this system, when Indians ignore our western idea of man’s dominance over nature. Maybe that is why it matters. We have spread our ideas all over the world, thinking our ways are better. But when cultures rely on traditional wisdom that allowed them to thrive for thousands of years before our interference, they are once again able to thrive. Maybe that is the connection; maybe that is why it matters. We can’t keep thinking of places like India as places that lack because they aren’t like us. Maybe being like us isn’t what India should be striving for. Maybe they should seek to be like India, and we should stop putting our beliefs all over every place else.