Belching Out the Devil

by Mark Thomas

  It was when Rajendra and his structures started to make old rivers run again that people began to notice him outside the district. I ask him about this story.

  ‘The river come after twelve years, the river was dry, and river come back in ’98.’

  ‘What was the name of the river?’

  ‘Arvari river.’

  ‘So this river was once dry…’

  ‘Dead and dry.’

  ‘And it is flowing?’

  ‘The river is perennial.’

  Using a series of dams built by villages along the length of it, the river started to flow again. Not surprisingly he began to attract press attention, articles appeared and awards quickly followed. Rajendra became known as the ‘Water Man of Rajasthan’.

  I am not exactly sure of how rainwater harvesting works, from the sound of it, you build dams and ponds in a place where water can collect and then it seeps into the ground. But maybe I am oversimplifying it and more to the point if it works and he can do it, can Coca-Cola? But this question is given short shrift, ‘I am saying they can’t give back to the region, the water they are taking is from the underground water. They can’t, they are not doing recharge water.’

  ‘But their publicity says “look at the rainwater harvesting we’re doing”, they’re in the papers yesterday saying we will be water neutral by the end of the year, what do you make...’

  ‘This statement, is a big lie, this is not possible, I can say that they are not doing what they are saying.’

  ‘OK,’ I say uncertainly.

  ‘It is impossible. They can’t do the water harvesting because they have no right on the water, so they can’t do. The water can only be harvested through the community. They can’t do it.’

  ‘You saying that technically they can’t do it?’

  ‘I’m saying technically they can’t do. ‘

  But I have heard nothing that proves this point and I worry that Rajendra’s Gandhian ideal of community self-reliance has become too dogmatic. I don’t quite understand why Coke can’t do what he has achieved? So I press the question home again, but he replies ‘My dear friend, we have a community doing water conservation, water harvesting and water management. I request you tomorrow go there and see where the community is doing these things. You will understand.’

  ‘Great.’

  And with that I take the next step towards the ashram.

  Twelve hours later the car wheels whirr with the familiar dry sound of motion along a fair to middling tarmac. The low noise leaves me feeling contented, it is the sound of connections having been made, people met and a journey underway. It is the sound that all is well. Quickly the trappings of the city fall behind us. The ashram is three hours’ drive north of Jaipur and its famous Red Fort.

  Lumbering lorries grinding through the highway to the desert replace the congestion of cars. The garish billboard hoardings hawking perfumes, burgers and pop stars gradually fade, and as their number diminishes so the number of camels increase. Nearly all of them have patterns shaved into their flanks, angular cuts in their coats creating a kaleidoscope pattern of flowers near each camel’s backside. Intentionally or not this is the ultimate act of optimism, to stick such a scented image so close to a camel’s arse.

  Devayani Kulkarni sits in the front passenger seat. She works with Tarun Bharat Sangh, Rajendra Singh’s NGO. She’s a small wiry woman of about forty with long black hair in plaits, jeans, gappy teeth and a cough, she is taking me to visit rainwater harvesting projects. Sitting in the back next to me is Kanhaiya Lal Gurjor dressed in a neat, pressed kurta, trousers and a set of glasses that make him look like a Fifties jazz intellectual. Kanhaiya worked on his first rainwater harvesting structure in 1989, a check dam: a traditional dam used for rainwater harvesting.

  ‘How many structures have you worked on since then?’

  ‘Forty,’ says Kanhaiya, answering the question as if he had just been asked how many combat missions he had flown.

  Gazing out of the back window I try to pick out distinguishing marks in the scrubland. ‘This is all semi-arid,’ says Devayani, indicating the surrounding landscape. Semi-arid is an understatement, I never knew there were this many shades of light brown.

  Although he’s not driving, Kanhaiya keeps his gaze fixed firmly on the road as he explains how the state’s annual rainfall can fall in just three days. ‘In Rajasthan sometimes you can get ten centimetres of rainfall in one hour.’

  ‘What? Ten centimetres an hour? That is huge!’

  ‘Sometimes it happen,’ says Devayani leaning over the front seat to tell me. ‘If we don’t construct any check dam or rainwater harvesting structure that rainfall goes. It does not go inside the ground, it goes…’ and with that she shoos imaginary water away with her hand, ‘…when we arrest this water with a check dam the groundwater recharges and that goes in the wells.’

  So that is all there is to it, build a dam in a strategic place which stops the water, the water then soaks into the ground and this fills up the wells.

  Stopping halfway up a hillside we step out on to a scrubland that is called Darugula Ka Bandha. The hills climb behind us with a few bits of brush over the slopes, and these knotted little skirmishes seem to be the only plant life in sight. It is only when Kanhaiya shows me, ‘There. This is where the water comes,’ that I begin to notice the gullies. They are cut into the earth, lightly scarring the ground and streak downwards. At a second glance tiny signs of life become a bit more obvious, piles of stones dislodged by once rushing water have tumbled down only to re-lodge at a lower point, making untidy altars where they gather. ‘Water comes down quickly, here and here and here,’ he says pointing. Then smiling for the first time he says, ‘Shall we see the structure?’

  A short walk downhill leads to a dam made of earth about five metres high, its sloping sides and flat top make it look like a Toblerone that has had its tip filed off. ‘This fills with 3.5 metres of water when it rains,’ says Kanhaiya pointing at the dry pit behind the dam. Then he strides along a pathway on top of the earthen mound. As we follow him Devayani explains that the villagers collect money for the materials but use their own labour to build each pond or dam. We catch up with Kanhaiya looking downhill, and with small gesture of his hand points us to the other side of the dam and a wooden hut, a well with upright supports and a winding rope but most remarkably a garden - a vegetable garden. In the middle of a landscape Neil Armstrong would feel at home in there are tomato plants. Kanhaiya and Devayani point in turn.

  ‘Mustard.’

  ‘Wheat.’

  ‘Black gram.’

  And to crown the scene a young papaya tree stands upright in defiance of its surroundings.

  The rest of the day is full such moments but my favourite was the village of Palpura, where the local rainwater harvesting structures culminate in a pond area. Climbing over a low wall we set off towards clumps of bright green tall grass.

  ‘This is elephant grass,’ laughs Devayani.

  ‘Elephant?’

  ‘Yes, because it is tall enough for an elephant to hide in.’ Kanhaiya is ahead of us again and, turning into the grass, he disappears. We find him walking carefully along an overflow, slippery with algae and a slight but steady cascade of water. Walking out after him on to the concrete I look up the pond, about a hundred metres long and maybe forty wide in places. Gulls swoop on it. Egrets emerge by the bullrushes, dragonflies hover and fish peep from under small lilies. A white temple sits on one bank where a troop of monkeys roam under the sound of the peacocks yowl.

  ‘Sorry, what was that?’ enquires Devayani standing next to me on the overflow.

  ‘Oh, it’s just an expression. It’s very colloquial, very hard to translate. It means this is very beautiful.’

  I had not realised she was quite so close behind and had overheard my muttered words of awe, ‘Fuck me I’m in a Yes album cover.’

  As we stand on the overflow, listening to the burbling water I decide to mention the C word and
say, ‘Coca-Cola claim they put more water into the ground than they take out, is that possible?’

  ‘How much they take out?’ says Devayani.

  ‘Well it varies but a million litres a day at some points.’

  ‘Does the company protect the water that much every day?’ she says in contempt and disbelief that the company can put an equal amount of water back into the ground.

  ‘They say they do…’

  ‘That is not possible, it is impossible.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you don’t get that much rain every day.’

  ‘But they say they do put more water in than they get out…’

  ‘Only a local community can protect, maintain and manage water resources properly. If you hand over water resources to a big company they could not think about the local situation, of how to protect these resources. So if any company construct a rainwater harvesting structure it is not enough for conservation.’

  Undoubtedly Kanhaiya and Devayani have performed small miracles and I am looking at one right now, but there is just not enough science in their answer.

  I am not sure where these past days have led in regard to Coca-Cola. Everyone has said Coke can’t recharge the amount of water they claim to, but no one has proven this. No one has factually explained their claims. So have Coke’s critics got it wrong? I don’t know. The only thing I know for sure is I started as a sceptic, believing rainwater harvesting to be a pseudo-science and find myself lying on an old mattress in an ashram with a sense of genuine wonder. I curl up and sleep the sleep of a convert.

  Having managed to stay here without being reborn, changing my name, getting a henna tattoo or even playing hacky sack with Dutch travellers recovering from dysentery, I bid farewell to the two-frog chorus in the dormitory; whom I have grown rather fond of and have nicked named Paul and Linda. Travelling south to Kaladera I arrive with genuine trepidation at Coke’s rainwater harvesting structures.

  ‘Hindustan Coca-Cola together in Development’ reads the wind-blown sign by the side of the track, announcing we have arrived at one of Coke’s much-vaunted projects. ‘Kaladera a dream’, it reads, sounding more ambiguous than the company’s statements on the matter. If my dad had seen the sign he would have said it was ‘on the piss’ as it leans heavily to one side. However, according to the information on the board Coke has dug seventy filtered boreholes to a depth of 103 feet to recharge the local water supply. Apparently this benefits not only the farmers but the local area as well. This sounds simple and practical: rainwater trickles down through various thicknesses of gravel in the hole and percolates into the groundwater, instead of running off or evaporating.

  These holes are laid along an old dry riverbed in the middle of an expanse of barren scrubland, where the sandy soil crunches underfoot, clear and crunchy like walking on stale crisps. A few trees make the effort but I’ve seen more flora and fauna in a builder’s yard. It is hot, dusty and virtually featureless, exactly the kind of place you’d bump into Ray Winston while filming a Costa del Crime caper. The first borehole is a metre wide concrete circle, about half a metre deep before the first layer of gravel starts. It is surrounded by a few bits of rubble and a plastic bottle. The second hole is every inch as glamorous as the first, except this time a three-course brick circle has been built around the hole. Someone later took exception to it and kicked some of the bricks over. Possibly fans of the first hole gripped by inter hole rivalry.

  There are another sixty-eight to go…

  Across the way is a concrete road leading to the home of one Kaladera’s politicians, an ex-Panchayat leader. They must have got along very well with Coke as the company has installed a metal hand pump just outside their home, for the community obviously, though in this case the community seems to be mainly the Panchayat leader’s family. A man from the village emerges from a palm leaf shelter by the side of the old Panchayat leader’s home and offers to crank the groaning handle up and down to illustrate the pump in action. After five minutes he is hotter and thirstier than when he started. ‘It’s useless,’ he says, ‘sometimes you can get water but it can take half an hour to bring it up.’ It is Coca-Cola we have to thank for this thirty-minute wait, after all they have alleged they are a net contributor to the groundwater, so without their help there would be even less water and it would take even longer to draw the water. The villager walks back to the shade of the shelter muttering - possibly a hymn of praise to Coca-Cola.

  The TERI report - Coke’s commissioned work - noted that field visits to randomly chosen external recharge shaft sites ‘revealed that all the shafts were in a dilapidated condition.’7

  From what I can see out here I would agree. The place is dilapidated. Frankly, Pompeii looks in better condition and that was buried under volcanic ash. Coke claim they do the maintenance work just before the monsoon.8 I suppose it doesn’t matter what it looks like if it does the job, though at this stage I am convinced of nothing.

  Someone has to know something about the veracity of Coke’s claim and that someone might well be Professor Rathore, a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies in Jaipur, whose data is quoted in the TERI report. The professor specialises in water resource management and the fine academic tradition of vertical filing systems. Stacks of reports, articles, notes and statistics form tall ordered blocks around the room. So prominent are these piles that if ever a map were to be drawn of it, this would be the first study to require contour lines. The walls are covered in hydro porn, pictures of large bodies of water, bare-arsed reservoirs and cheeky lakes. And stuck in one corner a board has term information, phone numbers, timetables and official pronouncements tacked on with drawing pins. I find the room strangely reassuring, it smacks of the twin pillars of academia: obsession and overwork.

  The professor sits behind his desk between two more literal pillars. He is somewhere in his fifties, and has (like many Indian men) innate trust in his ink pen’s durability and craftsmanship, as it sits neatly in the top pocket of his spotless white shirt. He peers over his glasses before taking them off and exudes the demeanour of an educator, that is an air of quiet and calm exasperation, a man who has had to explain the obvious too many times.

  ‘It is the rainfall pattern of Rajasthan which is important,’ says the professor. ‘If the rainfall is low, then the withdrawal is much more than the water that is being recharged through the rainfall. So it’s a perpetual depletion of the groundwater.’

  This much everyone seems to agree on. What I want to know is can Coke put up to fifteen times the amount of water they use in production back in the ground, so I start to ask my question, ‘The company are saying that they are using rainwater harvesting projects to recharge…’

  ‘It doesn’t work,’ he says shaking his head sadly.

  ‘But,’ I begin again, ‘one of the rainwater harvesting projects which they’ve got is on a dried riverbed, they’ve got seventy bore holes—’

  ‘That’s the wrong thing,’ He interrupts flicking his hand dismissively.

  ‘Why is that the wrong thing?’

  ‘Ask them how many times that river flowed, you will be shocked to know that in a year, in five years…OK, I’ll have to show you something.’ And with that he rummages in a pillar and plucks out a single piece of paper, showing the number of times the Jaipur area has been in drought. These are the figure that shows that the area has been in drought for 47 per cent of the last 106 years.

  Jaipur district frequency of occurrence of drought and its intensity since 1901-2006 Number of years district of Jaipur over past 106 years

  • 56 years normal

  • 10 years light drought

  • 17 years moderate drought

  • 12 years serious drought

  • 11 years very serious drought

  Source: Professor Rathore, Institute of Development Studies Jaipur

  After staring quietly at the piece of paper I look up at his expectant face and say ‘So there is not enough rain...’


  He affords a brief smile, ‘There is no run off,’ he says, referring back to the dry riverbed that won’t run without rain, ‘So you build a structure and it doesn’t work. It will work only when there is a run off. OK? That run off only takes place one or two years, and how much is that? Very small, so these rainwater harvesting structures are to bluff people, and the state.’

  ‘And it doesn’t work because the riverbed…’

  ‘Because of these reasons: the rainfall is very meagre; rainy days are very limited; droughts are a perpetual phenomenon, and where is the run off? Where is recharge? Where’s the water going to come from?’

  The professor makes the simple point that you can’t do rainwater harvesting without rainwater. But I still can’t quite believe Coke’s credibility rests solely on this, so I try and sneak in one more attempt. ‘Is there a way the company could do rainwater harvesting in a meaningful way in the area?’