So, again, we face a deadline - and today, I deliver or die.
It's a nice enough document that I'm editing. A development project report on watersheds: positive, with solid results to show and interesting as well.
We had quite a bit of rain last fortnight and one neighbour was quite anguished that in spite of so much water all around, he had still needed to order a water tanker. There's the story in a nutshell. Nature is bountiful, even for the way we are multiplying now, but we can't seem manage her gifts.
This watershed story is so much fun - contour bunds, check dams, trees... small, common-sensical interventions and the groundwater table goes up.
We'd gone trekking in the Sahyadris a few years ago and stayed one night at a village that had a most beautiful water tank a little distance away. The men and women in our group were allotted different time slots, and we had trudged across with plastic packets stuffed with toiletries and clean clothes. The village folk were bemused at this sudden descent, but willing enough to share... and the bath was an exhilarating business. I remember being so charmed with this common resource... it had only fed my desperate wish for a rural life.
Trivia for the day: The most popular drumstick variety in some parts of Tamil Nadu, I learnt, was a high-yielding, drought-resistant variety called PAVM, or the Pallapatti Alagarsamy Vellimalaimurugan Moringa - named after an innovative farmer who developed this new type. More here.
It's a nice enough document that I'm editing. A development project report on watersheds: positive, with solid results to show and interesting as well.
We had quite a bit of rain last fortnight and one neighbour was quite anguished that in spite of so much water all around, he had still needed to order a water tanker. There's the story in a nutshell. Nature is bountiful, even for the way we are multiplying now, but we can't seem manage her gifts.
This watershed story is so much fun - contour bunds, check dams, trees... small, common-sensical interventions and the groundwater table goes up.
We'd gone trekking in the Sahyadris a few years ago and stayed one night at a village that had a most beautiful water tank a little distance away. The men and women in our group were allotted different time slots, and we had trudged across with plastic packets stuffed with toiletries and clean clothes. The village folk were bemused at this sudden descent, but willing enough to share... and the bath was an exhilarating business. I remember being so charmed with this common resource... it had only fed my desperate wish for a rural life.
Trivia for the day: The most popular drumstick variety in some parts of Tamil Nadu, I learnt, was a high-yielding, drought-resistant variety called PAVM, or the Pallapatti Alagarsamy Vellimalaimurugan Moringa - named after an innovative farmer who developed this new type. More here.
