Our focus is ensuring access to drinking water and sanitation - our mission is to provide, drinking water in every household, in every school, public institutions like hospital and anganwari centers.We use technology, create infrastructure but we also need communities to manage it. We have to inspire young generations and inculcate in them the sense of responsibility for standing up for water management. We train local youth and people like in Jal Bandhus to provide the service to the community members both for water and sanitation. If there is less water then what you consider to do to build an infrastructure but the water also needs to flow through the infrastructure. The water cycle needs to be understood by people in its entirety not just the infrastructure that cannot help in the long run.

In our work, where there is water scarcity, there are two ends that we focus on. One is to store more water and use only stored rainfall water, create roof rainwater harvesting wherever possible and also tried to store that water underground by certain techniques like watershed approach. We also do water budgeting based on the rainfall received in a certain area.

Second approach is to manage and conserve. Agriculture continues to draw a lot of water. Drinking water system is also not sustainable. The communities we work with for drinking water management, they are involved in Agriculture. explore how we cut down the consumption of water in Agriculture using tricks *****and sprinkler which consume less water for irrigation and advising farmers not to go for crops that require heavy consumption of water and shift to crops like millets which consume less water.

The knowledge is there in terms of what need to be done to conserve water but it's not very easy because it's an issue of behaviour changes. How do you convince a farmer not to grow wheat or rice which is easy to produce and sell, rather than to grow millets which are agro economically conducive .


To be continue in part - 2