How traditional water bodies can help India deal with looming water crisis

Back in my father’s ancestral house in a village in Punjab’s Amritsar district, there was an old well that served the needs of two extended families. My father’s uncles, aunts and their children and grandchildren, my uncles, aunts and their kids, the family that lived next door, all drew water from it for bathing, drinking, cooking, washing clothes. Even when piped water came to the village, the well remained in use. The taps would sometimes run dry; the well wouldn’t. So they never had to store water in buckets or drums the way we in the city needed to. As a child it never occurred to me what a luxury that was.

What made me think about that well all these years later was a visit to the Humayun’s Tomb and the nearby Sunder Nursery in Delhi where centuries-old wells and baolis (stepwells) have been or are being restored to once again hold water and replenish aquifers. Drawing on lessons from the past, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC), which, along with the Archaeological Survey of India and the Central Public Works Department, restored the Humayun’s Tomb and Sunder Nursery and is also working on the Qutb Shahi Tombs in Hyderabad, demonstrates how traditional water bodies can help the country deal with an imminent water crisis.

In one corner of the Humayun’s Tomb complex, away from the Mughal emperor’s grand mausoleum and hidden from the eyes of tourists, stand the ruins of Arab ki Sarai (sarai means hostelry, or inn). Built in the 1560s by Humayun’s widow, Hamida Banu Begum, to accommodate the 300 Arabs whom she had brought from Mecca, the walled complex houses a unique L-shaped stepwell. Work is on to restore it, with funds from the German Embassy. “After just eight feet of cleaning the earth from the baoli, we hit the springs,” says AKTC CEO Ratish Nanda. 

Young men from the Nizamuddin community routinely clean the baoli. Photo: Dalip Kumar

An ancient well near the baoli has also been cleaned. The whole Arab ki Sarai complex is being regraded so that rainwater, rather than going waste, flows into this well and from there into the baoli.

Between the Humayun’s Tomb Complex, Sunder Nursery and the nearby Nizamuddin basti — an expanse of approximately a kilometre — there are an astonishing 15 such Mughal-era wells. All of them have been desilted, one could say in keeping with the Union government’s water conservation campaign, the Jal Shakti Abhiyan. The water from these wells is now being used to irrigate the gardens at the heritage sites.

A Mughal-era well near the Arab ki Sarai baoli has a pipe at its mouth to collect rainwater. Photo: Dalip Kumar

When AKTC began its engagement with the Humayun’s Tomb site in 1997, the first thing it needed to do was restore its sprawling gardens. That required water. As the restorers started cleaning the gardens, they found remains of five 16th-century wells, each filled with compost, rock, stone and construction waste. “We started digging this muck out and some 40-50 feet deep down hit wooden foundations. Would you believe that?” recalls Nanda. One of the most interesting — and remarkable — discoveries was that these wells had been built not just to draw water but to also collect rainwater and divert it back to the aquifer. “This,” says Nanda, “was an attempt at rainwater harvesting in the 16th century.” Later, more wells were discovered, some through old drawings, others by chance. If there are even more, the conservationists are yet to discover them.

The L-shaped Arab ki Sarai baoli in Humayun’s Tomb complex being restored. Courtesy AKTC

Both the Humayun’s Tomb complex and Sunder Nursery are garden sites. So their builders made provisions for collecting every possible drop of water — even though both were built near a river, the Yamuna. Inspired by this, the conservationists have put 128 groundwater recharge pits in the gardens of Humayun’s Tomb. These pits contain rocks and boulders through which rainwater can seep down to the aquifer. On the surface they are neatly covered with earth and grass. 

The 90-acre Sunder Nursery, however, doesn’t depend on historic wells alone. “We also have our own rainwater harvesting tanks,” says Nanda. Together with the ancient wells and traditional conservation methods, the area is water-sufficient.

The site of the 16th- and 17th-century Qutb Shahi Tombs located in the Ibrahim Bagh near the Golconda Fort in Hyderabad, however, has only stepwells — seven of them. The tombs are built on hard rock with hardly any underground aquifer, so these stepwells serve mainly as water-collecting chambers or holding tanks.

When AKTC started restoring the tombs in 2013, it had to buy tonnes of litres of water. The biggest stepwell, the 60-foot-deep Bari Baoli, had collapsed over the ages and was unusable. It took three years to restore it. Now, 10 million litres of water get collected in the baolis each monsoon, enough to meet the irrigation and conservation needs at the site that has 72 monuments and is spread over 108 acres.

BEFORE AND AFTER: The Bari Baoli at the Qutb Shahi Tombs in Ibrahim Bagh near the Golconda Fort, Hyderabad

 

 

The builders from the Qutb Shahi period were careful to lay the channels and gradations in a way that rainwater would flow seamlessly into the baolis through the openings that are visible just under the surface. Meanwhile, work is on to restore their façades. 

Back in Delhi, in 2008, just a year after the trust began the Nizamuddin Urban Renewal Project to engage the community in the conservation efforts, the 14th-century stepwell near revered Sufi saint Nizamuddin Aulia’s dargah partly collapsed. Its water considered holy, the community requested AKTC to repair and clean it. Forty feet of rubbish were removed to expose a circular stepwell within the rectangular enclosure. “As we hit the bottom, the aquifers erupted like jets,” says Nanda. “We got the water tested —  extremely clean.”

The stepwell is choked on three sides by built structures, some of which had to be pushed back to allow it to breathe. Shanties atop one of its thick walls were removed and their residents relocated to homes that the trust built for them.

But challenges remain. The Nizamuddin dargah gets about five million pilgrims a year, so a lot of garbage still ends up in the baoli. Some young men from the community are employed to enter the water with safety tubes to physically clean the stepwell. There’s fish, too, that eats up the algae and mosquito larvae.

Baolis and wells do two things: collect precious rainwater and recharge the groundwater. “Both are equally important,” says Nanda. “And what does it cost to clean them? Only human labour. I am not talking about conservation, but cleaning.” It took 8,000 man hours to clean the Nizamuddin baoli with buckets, he says. This work of cleaning traditional waterbodies — wells, temple tanks, baolis, moats and village reservoirs — can easily be done under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, he adds.

The Ministry of Jal Shakti was launched in May this year with the mandate to find solutions to India’s escalating water crisis. A combination of traditional knowledge and modern methods could offer some answers. The picture of Rani ki Vav, “the queen’s stepwell” in Gujarat, which is on the new 100-rupee note, could act as a reminder.

B Dasarath Reddy contributed to this report