Lavanya Naidu: Design Opportunities Water (Team – Desert Rajasthan)

Lavanya Naidu: Design Opportunities Water (Team – Desert Rajasthan)

Spilt mercury from a broken thermometer. The mercury is spilt and collects on the floor. Try and grasp it between your fingers and it seems to slip away. Water is like mercury.

Fifteen years hence, as I sit on a dune and look over the canal, I see the sand lift, fly and settle, but this time it’s going to be different. Silt deposition, is going to be trouble of the past. A vision, to bring an opportunity to existence.

The papers talk about Rajasthan’s budget. Water projects are still an incomplete issue, but the funds are trickling in. Neighboring states sport a cold shoulder.

Approaching the NGO had been a good initiative. My concept was that of a filtration system for the decades back failure of the Indira Gandhi Nehar Project. It was to stop the silt settling in the canals water supply, as a result of which the water reaching the agricultural fields was unfit for cultivation. The filtration system will be derived from available materials. First gravel to remove the bigger deposits and then sand to purify the water further. That water would then be channelized to the fields. Immedia tely after the filtration, the canals would necessarily have to be covered, to avoid any further contamination. Little notifications on the filtration issue, every alternate week, by the village panchayat would prove helpful. As farmers gain awareness the ambiguity on the issue of the measure of water supply shall disappear. The revival of the old traditions of conserving, preserving and harvesting water is in action, however, the situation today is different; what with fluctuations in demand and supply being the only consistent thing.

I am a designer and I shall communicate. To start small but to spread the word. I’ve worked on a few animation short films that I’ve distributed to village panchayats for community screenings. If people can’t relate to people any longer, hopefully fictitious characters will.

As word on the filtration concept spreads to other NGO’s, the funds roll in and the initiation of the project begins.

I shake my kaleidoscope and see a change in the pattern, a better change.What we can’t solve as individuals, we shall solve as a team.

Rajasthan, a future of oases, not mirages.

Lavanya Naidu: (Team – Desert Rajasthan)