Ancient Indians understood the art of water governance. Most of India’s traditional water management has been at the community level; relying upon diverse, imaginative and effective methods for harvesting, storing, and managing rainfall, runoff and stream flow. Inscriptions on Tamil Nadu’s temples record administrative and social decisions from a time when they were a seat of authority for the local community.

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Water scarcity in India:

• Many Indian cities, including Delhi and Bangalore, face water crisis, especially that of freshwater.
• A World Bank study puts the plight of the country in perspective:
  • 163 million Indians lack access to safe drinking water.
  • About 210 million Indians lack access to improved sanitation.
  • 21% of communicable diseases are linked to unsafe water.

Ancient Indian Culture and Water Conservation:

Reverence for the resource:

• Inscriptions from 700-1,000 years ago, connected to water conservation in temples at places like Mannarkovil, Cheranmahadevi, Tirukurungudi, Kovilpatti, and Pudukkottai attest to a few aspects.
• Temple inscriptions were always documents connected with the sale, transfer and maintenance of irrigated lands.
• In the Pandya empire, water conservation was a completely local affair. The entire community, through the elected temple mahasabha, managed it. This meant that there was constant supervision, ownership and responsibility. All systems and processes were sustained through an emotional connection with the resource.
• Water from the Tamirabarani and the Vaigai rivers was taken through channels into formations like eris (small lakes) and per-eris (bigger lakes).
• Channels created square parcels of lands called sadirams and they were subdivided into smaller padagams of land, all of which had numbers. There were as many as 20-24 padagams in a sadiram.
• They were taxed differently based on how fertile they were — a system far more complex and farmer-friendly than today.

Care for the local terrain:

• Every tank had multiple weirs, always built in consonance with the local terrain, to drain out excess water. Using these, farmers irrigated the fields.
• There were complex calculations on allocation by turns (murai) and hours of supply (nir naligai).
• The interests of the boatmen in the lower estuaries and ports were also taken care of so that there was enough water there to permit them to bring boats up the river.
• The upper reaches had a higher number of large tanks which fed water into the smaller ones, tanks and ponds before it finally drained into the sea.
• As a result, during floods, the limits were rarely breached, and during droughts, each tank had water.

Public Participation:

• Maintenance of the tanks through desilting and enlargement and building and maintaining of new canals was a continuous process. More than a hundred inscriptions across the region deal exclusively with this.
• Fishing rights for the lakes helped defray maintenance costs. Revenues were high enough for the excess profits to be deployed in building larger halls in temples that could be used for public functions.
• Maintenance was a local responsibility and not that of the king. Many capital-intensive projects were funded by the dancing women of temples.

Conclusion:

Ecologically safe engineering marvels of water conservation have existed in India for nearly 1,500 years, including traditional systems of water harvesting, such as the bawari, jhalara, nadi, tanka, and khadin. They continue to remain viable and cost-effective alternatives for replenishing depleted groundwater aquifers. With government support, they could be revived, upgraded and productively combined with modern rainwater-saving techniques such as anicuts, percolation tanks, injection wells and subsurface barriers. This may be a far more sustainable approach to alleviating the water scarcity crisis across India.