Struggling for water in the world's wettest place

Struggling for water in the world's wettest place
A J PHILIP

It was a great disappointment. What I expected at Cherrapunjee, the rain capital of the world, situated 1,300 metres above sea-level, were lush green forests, heavy, unpredictable rains, deafening waterfalls, mountainous springs and meandering streams. But what I could see were women and children trekking long distances to fetch drinking water, barren hillsides and huge gorges that were bone dry. I then realised that this was actually one of the "wet deserts" of the world.

For Cherrapunjee's 30,000-odd people, this is one of the worst periods of the dry season. Old residents say the situation has been deteriorating with each passing year and the pity is that there is no solution in sight for their problem. All they can do is to wait for the rains.

The last showers they remember to have received were in November, although the Cherrapunjee meteorological office recorded 27.8 mm rainfall in January. "The problem Cherrapunjee faces is very simple. There is hardly any soil left there to retain water because the rain, over thousands of years, has washed it all away. Five minutes after the rain, there is no water to be seen anywhere there," says Dr Balajied Syiem, a local ruler, speaking at his headquarters at Smit, near Shillong.

There is a simple explanation for Cherrapunjee's problem. The town is one of the first to witness the advent of western civilization when David Scott, an East India Company agent, chose it to set up the headquarters of the British administration in the Northeast. But the British did not find life congenial here and subsequently opted for Shillong. They certainly had not anticipated the oppressive effect that the rain and isolation would have on the temperaments of the young men sent out to administer the area. Small wonder then that in Cherrapunjee's British graveyard, a number of tombstones still bear the faint, weathered legend, ``Died by His Own Hand''. It gave rise to the humorous proverb current in those days that the average age of the Britisher in Cherrapunjee was two monsoons.

In 1850, Joseph Dalton Hooker, a naturalist, spent the monsoon months in Cherrapunjee. He found it "as bleak and inhospitable as can be imagined". Hundred and fifty years later, the situation is much the same. It occupies a spur of flat tableland five km long and three km wide. During the monsoons, waterfalls line the wooded limestone cliffs that forms its backdrop, foaming out of the trees into cloud-filled ravines. The southern limits of the spur drops steeply away to the flooded plains of Bangladesh. Cherrapunjee's lofty elevation gives the visitor a grandstand view of the country below. With nowhere else to go, the overflow from these hills goes surging out across the undefended flatlands, and ultimately contributes to the annual flooding that Bangladesh experiences.

Yet, despite this excess of water, come winter and there is acute shortage. The only source of water for the residents is a stream about two km away. Though perennial, the flow is just a trickle during these months. Water is pumped into a small tank at Upper Cherra to be distributed among the residents. But the supply is so meagre and undependable that women and children spend the better part of the day fetching water. They use wooden carts, bicycles and bamboo poles to carry the water collected in buckets and other containers. It is common to find women washing clothes all along the stream.

What has contributed to this scarcity is the conspicuous deforestation in the region. The hills are all barren except for isolated patches of oak forest. These are the sacred groves where the villagers worship U ryngkew U basa, the tutelary deity of the village. Since it is an offence to cut trees here for any purpose other than for funeral obsequies, the forests here have been preserved. They testify to ecological wisdom of the Khasi elders of yore.

The Khasis who inhabit the Cherrapunjee hills still keep these groves intact, although they had been indiscriminate in felling trees elsewhere to make way for jhum (shifting) cultivation. The mining for lime and coal, which are found in abundance in these hills, also contributed to forests disappearing. Afforestation has not kept pace. Father Justin, the principal of St. John Bosco School, situated at Maraikaphon in Upper Cherra, showed me the saplings he had personally planted in the campus three years ago. Despite every care, they remain stunted. "Cherrapunjee is an ideal place to have Bonsai plants," he said, more in despair than in humour.

According to him, just a few hundred meters below, the climate undergoes a total transformation. The Cherrapunjee people grow fantastic tropical fruits oranges, grapefruit, magnificent bananas, which cost Rs 5 a piece in Shillong. It has an "extraordinary exuberance of species" probably the richest in all of Asia. For instance, Taxus bacado, a medicinal plant with anti-cancer properties, is found here. Dr Sandi Syiem, a medical practitioner, who quit his lucrative job at AIIMS, Delhi, to set up an institution of his own at Shillong, puts it this way, ``While the plant is sold at a throwaway price, a milligram of medicine made out of it costs Rs 40,000."

Adversity bring out the best in human beings. The people of Cherrapunjee have learnt to live with water scarcity. At a local leader's home I watched a woman washing clothes with the barest minimum of water possible. "We can't afford to waste even a drop of water," she says. This realisation has fortunately sunk into community practices. Their slogan is "catch the rain water where it falls".

This is just what Swami Suprabhananda, principal of the 70 year-old Ramakrishna Mission school located at one of the highest points at Cherrapunjee, has been religiously doing. He is now busy supervising the construction of a school building. "We built a 10,000-gallon tank in which we stored rain water during the monsoon. We use this water for construction. For drinking purposes too, we have a separate tank." In the neighbouring St. John Bosco, the source of water for the hostelites is again rain water stored in an underground tank. "Because the water remains stagnant, we have to boil it before consumption," the school authorities explain. The idea of harvesting rain water is catching on, although individual families can't afford to build large storage tanks. Tubewells are out of question here for two reasons prohibitive cost because of the rocky terrain and the uncertainty about the yield.

"We had sunk one at enormous cost only to realise that it stopped yielding water after a few weeks," recalls the swami, who blames the local authorities for the water shortage. He argues that since the stream down below is perennial, all that it required is to build a small dam, costing no more than Rs 4-5 lakh, to supply water to the town.

According to Khasi customs, land belongs to the community and not the government. Therefore no development is possible without the active involvement of the local leaders. For some inexplicable reason, they have not evinced much interest in the swami's idea. Perhaps this reluctance to build a dam is because people know that their problems will disappear once the southwest monsoon visits their hills once again. For Cherrapunjee, it is an endless cycle: an abundance of water followed by great scarcity.