Low technology rain water harvesting

Written By Anindita Dasgupta

We are harvesting water with simple indigenous ways following the natural laws of terrains. We started managing the farm with unaltered landscape in 2019, only with digging of two ponds one on the lower part and the other at the highest end, as there was no waterbody in the farm. Then we slowly learnt with much pain that the village pond owners use our land as the passage for draining the overflown water during late monsoon. We started diverting the entire rain falling on our piece of land through simple trenches to our own ponds, using them as the natural catchment. We also dug deep trenches outside our land to bypass the water released from the village ponds in monsoon. We are still not able to retain enough water to take us through the harsh summer, but with better silt formation every year by adding raw cowdung to the ponds, digging ditches and swales en-route the main catchment areas wherever possible, we are progressing towards better water management every year.

Anindita Dasgupta

Founder of Heal Thy Earth, a Natural Integrated Farm

Anindita Dasgupta has spent the majority of her career in the consulting industry advising a breadth of clients from India and abroad on technology and process management. In 2018, Anindita set up a 5-acre natural integrated farm in Birbhum in rural Bengal with the intent of exposing locals to good agricultural and eco-friendly livelihood generation practices.

Through her endeavour, Anindita seeks to promote the conservative practices and lifestyles of indigenous farmers, and reduce their reliance on unsustainable means of food production and livelihood generation. Instead, drawing from her exposure to contemporary corporate discourses on sustainability, she attempts to empower farmers to embrace their traditional slow-but-steady cultivation practices and regain confidence in spontaneous, regenerative farming based lifestyles that have been used by indigenous communities to sustain themselves for centuries.

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