Success Stories and Case Studies

Chitradurga district in southern Karnataka is infamous for drought. People here constantly suffer from water shortage and in the last few years, the problem has escalated due to poor rainfall. 

Priya Ramasubban personifies the words ‘good things come in small packages’. This sprightly, self motivated enthusiast, saw a marshy, polluted cess pool, hemmed in by an open tract of land, where labourers and migrants daily dipped in for their morning ablutions. Talking to people around, she realised that this soggy piece of wetland was once a lake.

Waghad Dam in Nashik, Maharashtra, constructed in 1984-85, irrigated less than 1% of its total irrigable command area, while farmers in the tail area did not receive any water. Bapu Upadhye of Samaj Parivartan Kendra organised the local farmers, mobilized them to come together and fight for their water quota.

The name of a place can tell one much about its history. Take Mokla talab, a village 62 km southeast of Udaipur for example. Mokla means sufficient in Rajasthani and talab means pond. The village was named after its overflowing talab. But what happens when the talaab is overflowing no more?

It is a labour of love. For 10 years, the team at Nagaland Empowerment of People through Economic Development (NEPeD) held this experiment close to their hearts- a daunting task that is lighting up lives in far-off villages in the mountains of Nagaland today. The hydroger has made way for many to diversify their income through new activities and reduced women’s day-to-day drudgery.

Khazans are a unique man-made ecosystem that give Goa its traditional form of farming. Khazan lands are reclaimed lands from the river or sea.

 Visitors and the Uttarakhand Tourism Department liken the mountain to 'devbhoomi' or the heavens but it isn't often that a villager of the area echoes those sentiments. Most of them are weary of the unending struggle to live in harmony with those steep slopes that make all manner of infrastructure difficult.

As a faculty of the Earth Sciences Department at Goa University, Dr. A.G Chachadi wanted to develop a facility to harvest rainwater and recharge groundwater at the campus at Taleigao Plateau. He wanted to showcase rainwater harvesting within the campus and also spread awareness on the benefits of doing it.

The fourteen women and three men were rapt as Pan-'da' explained the intricacies of Himalayan geology. Every now and then, a question would be asked. Pan-'da' would then create an impromptu geological model using a notebook or a whiteboard eraser to explain the concepts. This was essential because the audience had no prior background in geology. Only some of them were even literate.