Drought. Many would call it a ‘natural disaster.’ But drought is really a ‘human-made’ disaster. Over the last one hundred years, the world has seen two major shifts in water management—first, individuals and communities have given over control almost completely to the state; and second, the use of rainwater has declined and been replaced by the exploitation of rivers and groundwater through dams and tubewells creating an unbearable stress on water from rivers and groundwater.
One proven solution, community-based rainwater harvesting—a paradigm of the past—is the topic of Making Water Everyone’s Business. This book is being republished and available for free by The Groundwater Project. It was originally published by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) which advocates for community-based water harvesting. The book shows how to develop structures for a social process that allows everybody to get involved with water collection, storage, and management.
Water is a strange natural resource: It can unite a community as easily as it can divide it. It is essential to build ‘social capital.’ While building water harvesting structures can be a very easy task, building an effective structure of self-management within village communities is much more difficult. To be successful, each structure must be the result of a cooperative social process—the ability of a community to work together.
With the 2001 release of their book, Making Water Everyone’s Business, authors/editors, Anil Agarwal, Sunita Narain, and Indira Khurana, show us what makes rainwater harvesting such a powerful technology. The simple richness of rainwater can be captured cooperatively before it—the world’s most fluid substance, water—disappears.
For more resources visit the Centre for Science and Environment website (https://www.cseindia.org/).