by David Funkhouser, a former senior editor and environmental reporter at The Hartford Courant

At a village meeting in Rajasthan, India, Ravindra Sewak of Safe Water Network presented a challenge: We can help you build a new cistern that will improve your water supply and your health, but you will have to pay for some of it, and take over and maintain the system.

The villagers balked. In this desert land where just a few inches of water fall each year, poverty rules. Typical annual incomes range from $1,000 to $1,600. Women and children can walk several kilometers each day to fetch water for drinking, cooking and cleaning. Dysentery is so common, Sewak said, it’s not even considered a disease anymore.

With so few resources, how could they pay for this, and handle this new work? “I had to leave at one point,” Sewak said, describing how he walked out of the meeting to let the residents ponder the question before them. “You have to make them believe that they have to maintain it. They need a sense of ownership and willingness to pay so they can see the long-term vision and take responsibility. … They need to contribute to make this work.”

That’s the sort of push that Safe Water Network,based in Westport and co-founded by the late actor Paul Newman, hopes will help build long-lasting solutions for villagers like those in Rajasthan.

The non-profit brings together people and resources to build clean water systems in the developing world.This spring,it joined with three organizations in Rajasthan to tackle the region’s water problems. Project funding comes primarily from the PepsiCo and Newman’s Own foundations.

Safe Water Network has already spent $110,000,and it will spend an additional $350,000 to support the Rajasthan rainwater harvesting initiatives, including all program costs, over the next 18 months, a spokeswoman said.

During the project, the Bhoruka Charitable Trust will help villagers build 750 household rainwater cisterns and refurbish 32 community cisterns. That will bring safe water to about 10,000 people in 40 villages.

The trust has operated in the region for 25 years,but the help from Safe Water Network will allow them to build many more cisterns, said the trust’s project officer, Shivendra Kumar.

He cited the family of Umed Singh, in the village of Bhattod in the Churu District. The eldest child, 12, could not attend school because she had to fetch water for the family from an open pool, often contaminated by cattle, about 2 kilometers from their home.

“With construction of a rainwater harvesting tank in his home, the family has … safe and good quality of drinking water at their doorstep,”Kumar said. “It improves their health and gives time to the children to [attend] school.”

Another partner, the Institute of Health Management, teaches residents how to maintain water quality and promotes better health and hygiene practices.

And the Centre for Micro Finance focuses on building financial models to sustain projects over time,including small-scale loans that help villagers pay for their water facilities.

“What we’ve learned from past work with rainwater harvesting is that traditional donor programs and subsidy models alone are too expensive to be replicated at a large scale,” said Jai Pal Singh, the center’s executive director.

Safe Water Network’s goal is to empower communities to own and care for the projects, and to build systems that are sustainable and scalable, CEO Kurt Soderlund said. The Rajasthan project also will develop policy models that local governments can apply more broadly to benefit a larger population.

Sewak, a former PepsiCo employee who is now 12 India country manager for Safe Water, estimated that India has 200 million to 250 million people who don’t have access to safe water. Worldwide, more than a billion people lack reliable sources of clean water, a problem that leads directly to disease and death.

The World Health Organization estimates 1.8 million people a year die from diarrheal diseases alone, 90 percent of them children under 5.

The Millennium Development Goals, set in 2000 and endorsed by 192 nations, seek to cut in half the number of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015.
Cisterns are an ancient way of collecting water,but in poorer communities, even new systems tend to break down within a few years, because the community lacks expertise and cannot afford to maintain them.

Sewak said he asks villages to provide 30 percent of the funding, while Safe Water Network pays the other 70 percent. Even that can be daunting.

Without cisterns, “a lot of these families are spending 10 to 15 percent of their earnings just to collect the water,” Sewak said. “They do not have the means to create these systems, they don’t have the capital. … We provide that support.”

Most villagers survive on agriculture, growing millet during the rainy season, he said. If they are blessed with extra rainfall, they may also grow black gram, which Sewak said they call “karj utaar” -the “alleviate debt” crop.

After he walked out of the village meetingSewak said, the residents relented and agreed to go along with the program.

Once the cistern is built, he said, “instead of spending $10 for water every month, they mayspend $3 or $4 … and that saving can go to repay the microfinance loan given to them.”
Villagers also spend less time and effort gathering water and suffer less from illness. That increases their productivity and income.

A second phase of the program will try to improve cistern design for more efficiency and lower cost, track how to best protect water quality, and look at different funding models.

——————————————————————————-

This story previously appeared in http://ctindianlife.com and is reprinted here with permission.