Akanksha : Design Opportunities Water (Team – Desert Rajasthan)

Akanksha : Design Opportunities Water (Team – Desert Rajasthan)

Rajasthan is a place where you will come across vivid, colourful images of the Indian culture and traditions yet when you turn the picture around, you see the disturbing truth of life of the people there. A life with a dearth of water.

Rajasthan already has a lot of means to conserve water and to use it efficiently, but the problem is that these means are not utilized to the fullest. 'Tankas' or underground tanks exist in a large number of houses there but they are not used because people get their water supply form the municipality.

I see myself getting the tanka owners together and setting up a co-operative of these people. This co-operative will revive the tankas and bottle the tanka water for sale. This will be a low budget system because the tanka water doesn't need to pass through an elaborate purification system before bottling. Thus the water can be sold at low prices to people in times of drought. Bottling the tanka water will give the tanka owners a financial incentive to revive the tankas and thus save the ground water, which is being depleted at a very alarming rate. This is a system, which uses the rain water effectively.

I also plan to spread the message of the 'Tanka Owners Co-operative' by designing brochures and advertisements that explain the system and it's purpose.

Contacting NGO'S through the period of this course will prove helpful later to derive financial assistance to setup this and make it run in the early stages. I realize that this process will require me to talk to people and convince them to join such a co-operative.

But I will make them realize the condition of water and the sorry state our resources are in. Also 15 years from now I expect the condition to be even worse than now. Hence the need to revive old systems of conserving water would be much higher.

Akanksha : (Team – Desert Rajasthan)