India's Water Revolution #2: The Biggest Permaculture Project on Earth! with the Paani Foundation

[Music] the polyp yes there is no waterfall we see because of the watershed treatment slow it gets reduce the speed in the last episode we took a journey with the Pawnee Foundation and learned about their competition between thousands of villages to see who can install the most amount of water harvesting structures in a 45 day period in this episode we journey again with the Pawnee foundation's chief adviser dr. Avinash pol to the village of Valu located in an arid area the state of Maharashtra the receives around 250 to 300 millimeters or 8 to 12 inches of rainfall per year valeu was the first-place winner of the very first water cup competition held in 2016 [Applause] this was a huge deal for them and when I visited more than three years after their victory they were continuing to work on their groundwater recharge projects this part of India receives nearly all of its rainfall during the three-month monsoons they can then be dry for the entire nine months remaining in the year so all of that water they have for drinking and farming comes in a short period of time and needs to last all the way through the long dry season once creeks and ponds dried up after the rains people are mostly getting their water for their homes and crops by pumping from hand dug wells this groundwater is the lifeblood of the village when wells run dry villagers have to import water and tanker trucks or migrate away in search of work until the monsoons come again this is why recharging groundwater is the focus of the water Cup competition when water harvesting structures are built that soak the monsoon rains into the ground ground water resources increased very quickly and this is what has happened in the village of velu since they won the competition in 2016 we traveled over bumpy roads to valley village to see the unique design they have developed for recharging the groundwater table we arrived at the village where we were met by a gang of older men on motorcycles would take us throughout the watershed to see their work so right now we are in the village view which is in corrugate esaron district satara of maharashtra this is one of the innovative project on a back side of me you can watch a percolation tank the purpose of the percolation tank is that to percolate the water after a rain season and it start to increase the groundwater table but but due to the improper side this percolation tank is made on a rocky area that's why the water does not percolate into the ground in the rainy season the water goes from this area this is called the West where and it reaches to the river at least for the four month and this water will remain for the four year fully air because it is on the rocky beast so although this reservoir has a large watershed of over 1,100 acres it was built over bedrock and was not soaking any water into the groundwater table even though lots of rain would run off during the monsoon season the water would just spill through the reservoir and flow on down the stream and out of the village without recharging the groundwater table meanwhile as the village was drying up for water percolation tanks just up from the village sat mostly empty these tanks were built originally to fill with rains and recharge the groundwater in the village but they have much smaller areas of land draining into them and had not filled during the last twenty five years of relative drought the villagers realize that if they raised the level of the spillway what dr. pol referred to as a waste Weir than the water level in the whole reservoir would rise and instead of all the water gushing through the spillway they could get the water to flow through a gate from the other side of the reservoir this gate then puts the water into an underground pipeline that flows by gravity using no electricity and the water is moved across the land to the other four percolation tanks to fill them up from the tanks the water soaks into the groundwater table and is stored in the ground for village and farm use so instead of a huge amount of water being lost out of the village quickly a surface flow during the rainy season it now seeps slowly underground making it available not only for valeu but for the many villages downstream of a loo as well due to this project this all for collation tanks are now filled with full of water which increase the level of groundwater all the wells are get recharged all the bore wells are get recharged and another important thing is that you can hear a wise of the you can hear the voice of the animals birds you can hear this wise which is not her few years back because totally it is a dry land now lasts from couple of years we preserve all this forest forest land and that's the that's why the ecosystem also now changing valeu village is a really advanced example of the work the Pawnee foundation they have solved their water problems and of the thousands of villages that competed in the water Cup competition in the last four years over 1,000 of those villages in the state of Maharashtra who say the same they have completely and permanently solved their water problems with a stable system for recharging groundwater they have established water resilience and defeated drought so what's next the Pawnee foundation doesn't use the word permaculture to describe what they do but their work is permaculture to its core from the permaculture perspective water management structures serve as the bones of a landscape system and built on top of those bones we find the body of organic soil forests thriving ecosystems biodiverse agriculture and prosperous communities water is not the end of the design it is the beginning the water cup competition is just the first step and now the Pawnee foundation has moved on to the next phase of their work the prosperous village competition this next phase of the competition is only open to the 1,000 villages that completely solve their water issues during the first competition the duration this next competition is two years and it goes in depth into these six main topics that the villages are judged on soil and water conservation water management and budgeting restoring soil quality and health increasing tree cover and growing forests creating protected grasslands of nutritious and palatable grasses creating the basis for every family to increase their income so imagine for a moment what type of cooperation and coordination it takes for a village to achieve all these goals over the entire landscape that it governs and to win the competition water and soil management on every farm and common land tree planting and forest establishment on private and community lands and having every single family in the village prosper from these developments these people need to truly reckon with social economic political and physical realities in a holistic design for their village in order to accomplish this and as we've seen the benefits are not just for the people but habitat species diversity and ecosystem health are also increased that right there is permaculture at its core the Pawnee Foundation has had thousands of villages recharging their aquifers and now over 1,000 villages working in a holistic manner on their ecological economic and social prosperity so far we've looked at just two of these villages Gaurav Adi and Valu and the scale of the land that they have improved so imagine these projects we have seen multiplied thousands of times in just four years the Pawnee foundation has created five hundred and fifty billion liters of water storage capacity and trained 51 thousand people in watershed restoration [Applause] they don't use the word permaculture to describe what they do but I'm naming the work of the Pawnee foundation as the biggest permaculture project on earth please make sure to subscribe and join us for our next episode of India's water revolution where we travel across India to the state of West Bengal where we tour the water harvesting projects and remote tribal villages where good work is being done when the most marginal lands by the most marginalized people [Music]

Channel: Andrew Millison

Views: 1,382,264

Keywords: Paani Foundation, permaculture, Andrew Millison, ecosystem restoration, water harvesting, greening the desert

Id: jDMnbeW3F8A

Length: 11min 24sec (684 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 27 2020