Ayyappa Masagi uses traditional means to restore water to parched earth. People in drought-prone areas call him a Modern Messiah, reports Chitra Ramaswamy

 
Like most children in the rural heartland of India, Ayyappa Masagi used to perform a ritual that was linked to his family’s survival, at the tender age of six. He would wake up at the crack of dawn and walk 3 km to the neighbouring village, by his mother’s side, to fetch water—every single day. When they got there, the sleepy child would clamber into a 20-ft-deep sand pit, at the risk of being buried alive should it cave in, and draw water from its mingy depths. Despite this risky ordeal, the pit would usually yield only one pot of water, which the boy would carry all the way back home.

The difference between other children and Ayyappa was that this scrawny kid from Gadag district in Karnataka was destined for greatness. The daily struggle for water, for his mother and the other women in his village, left a profound impact on his vulnerable mind, and he vowed to solve the water problem in his village when he grew up.

This was no childish promise. The Bengaluru-based Masagi has since transformed 26,000 hectare of dry land into wetland across the country, rejuvenated thousands of lakes, ponds, wells and borewells, and implemented rainwater harvesting projects in over 170 industries in and around Bengaluru and in villages on the Karnataka-Andhra Pradesh border. His success has also prompted foreign governments to approach him to replicate his water conservation methods in their countries.

Masagi, whose early life was defined by poverty and scarcity, had a naturally inquiring mind and he grew up to be a mechanical engineer. He combined textbook knowledge with traditional wisdom and simple technology to devise simple but effective water conservation and water harvesting solutions for drought-prone regions.

A social entrepreneur honoured by the Ashoka Foundation, Masagi has been turning barren, brown landscapes into lush green orchards and fertile fields across India for 15 years. With no fancy equipment or machinery, and with just a series of trenches, pits, channels, boulders, gravel and sand, it seems water springs wherever he goes. His extraordinary ability to produce water from the parched earth has earned him nicknames like Water Warrior, Water Gandhi, Doctor of Dry Borewells and even Modern Bhageeratha, after the mythical king who brought the River Ganges to earth from the heavens.

“The earth is the world’s largest God-given tank. It absorbs water, filters it and sends it to the bores and wells. We have tampered with this process and robbed the earth of its water,” says the 60 year-old social entrepreneur and author of the book, Bhageeratha: War On Water Crisis. Masagi’s entire body of work is based on a very simple principle: “Collect it, filter it and put it back into the earth. The earth has to be recharged with every drop of water that you use rather than allow it to run waste,” he reasons.

His arsenal of techniques includes the construction of lakes to harvest rainwater and recharge borewells; installation of seepage-type borewell-recharging units; infiltration wells; stream-water harvesting; pit-based rainwater harvesting; tree-based agriculture; soak trenches and pits; patta bunding; compartment bunding; plastic mulching; inter-basin water transfer; reuse of grey water; and other systems.

To fulfil his childhood promise, Masagi first educated himself and enrolled with the Industrial Training Institute. He soon found work with Bharat Earth Movers Ltd as a fitter. To further qualify himself, he joined evening college and obtained a diploma in mechanical engineering. This was followed by a 23-year stint with Larsen & Toubro (L&T) in Bengaluru, where he rose to become a manager.

But his life’s ambition required him to tread a very different path. In 1994, he bought a 6-acre plot in his ancestral village and used it as a laboratory to develop his creative ideas on water conservation. “I built a hut on the plot and pursued farming on the weekends,” he shares. “Initially, I reaped a rich harvest, then I went through a period of drought and then floods washed away my hut. I spent the night up on a tree when I got a brainwave as I helplessly watched huge quantities of precious rainwater flow into the sea.”

Thus, Masagi’s tryst with building trenches, lakes, bunds and soak pits began, to channel rainwater into the water table and use natural means to store it for use in times of scarcity. As more and more creative ideas filled his head, he was finally ready to take the plunge. Masagi took early retirement from L&T in 2002 to hone his water management conservation and start using it to help rural communities across India.

A big part of his mission has always been to spread awareness on water management and, towards this end, he had organised a motorcycle rally called Jaladhaare (meaning ‘force of gushing water’) across Karnataka in 2002. While on this rally, he stopped at a villager’s home to ask for a drink of water. “I heard a woman’s voice from inside saying she could give me water for any other use except drinking,” he recalls. “It hurt me so much that I intensified my work in this field.”

As he pressed on with his mission, Masagi’s work drew the attention of the Ashoka Foundation, the international organisation that promotes social entrepreneurship. Through its Ashoka: Innovators for the Public initiative, the foundation honoured Masagi with a fellowship in 2004, the very springboard he needed to launch his Water Literacy Foundation (WLF), which he set up a year later.

With this, he was able to take his work to a new level and was soon approached by a variety of clients, including farmers, schools and industries. For instance, when the water table on the premises of the Vedanta Academy in Coimbatore dipped alarmingly, it approached WLF to implement borewell recharge techniques and build a lake. Under WLF’s guidance, the school adopted five different water management systems to harvest rainwater and recharge its borewells. It also implemented grey-water harvesting techniques. The result was magical: the school’s dry open well, which had not yielded a drop for a decade, is now brimming with water. Not only is it used daily, the well also automatically refills.

The year 2008 was an important one for Masagi—that’s when he set up a for-profit company called Rain Water Concepts. He runs this company on a cross-subsidisation model, where the profits he earns from his commercial clients are used to subsidise the work he does with poor and parched rural communities.

As his reputation spread, many industries seeked Masagi’s expertise, including multinationals like Pepsi, Bisleri and Wipro. “In 2011, ACC Cements approached us to set up rainwater harvesting systems. We built 18 infiltration wells, an artificial lake and a sump. One of their borewells, which had run dry years ago, sprung to life in just 15 days. The water quantity in their active borewell doubled as the water table rose considerably,” recounts Masagi. Oddly enough, 17 dry borewells belonging to neighbouring farmers too began to yield water. This is why he has a reputation for producing water seemingly out of nowhere!

A year later, Masagi worked his magic at the Bisleri unit in Devanahalli, Karnataka. The company’s borewells were drying up and it was a serious problem. “Ayyappa Masagi built an artificial lake with a borewell recharging unit on our property, with the capacity to hold 23 lakh litre of water,” recalls senior manager G N Vishwanath. “He also installed a rainwater harvesting system, whereby we harvested rainwater runoff from the Bisleri plant, highway rainwater and runoff from neighbouring properties. The project was a stunning success. Within a year, the borewell yield increased from 3,000 litre to 5,000 litre of water per hour. The static level also increased from a depth of 100 ft to 80 ft from ground level.”

That said; our water doctor doesn’t believe in only fixing problems; he wants to teach people to overcome their own challenges. To this end, Masagi has been conducting widespread water conservation and management campaigns across India. He started in 2008, during the United Nations Year of Water, when his WLF kicked off educational campaigns by celebrating the Rainwater Festival in schools in Hubli and Dharward cities in Karnataka.

Apart from exposing students, teachers and parents to the dire need for water management, Masagi’s awareness campaign also encouraged schools to develop a curriculum that includes water recharging methods; models to teach children to save, harvest and reuse water; and ways to put these to daily use. Simple yet catchy, his approach to spreading water literacy includes songs and couplets he has composed himself; he screens documentaries; writes articles; gives field demonstrations and lectures; and conducts workshops.

Masagi has also started Water Literacy on Wheels, where he travels to remote corners of Karnataka to make farmers water-literate. Armed with a laptop, CD and booklet on water-harvesting instructions, he goes from village to village, talking about his projects to farmers and state government officials at farmers’ festivals.

Masagi feels the real problem is not with water or rain but the attitude of people—communities, politicians and bureaucrats. “While wealthy people spend several crores of rupees on building palatial houses, they are indifferent and unwilling to spend a few thousands on installing recharging systems that would give them a permanent solution. On the other hand, slum dwellers and villagers do not have the financial capacity to install them. Financial constraints continue to be a constant factor too.”

Water scarcity is a universal challenge and our modern messiah is now advising foreign governments on how to manage their scarce water resources. Among these are the governments of the Northwest Province in South Africa, and Angola and Botswana, also in Africa. “To enable water-efficiency in India, integration between urban, rural, industrial and agricultural sectors is essential,” he emphasises. “Instead of large-scale river-linking or damming projects, simple techniques at a micro-level for self-sufficiency will change the situation. Who says there is a water crisis? If we adopt simple methods, India will be a water-surplus nation by 2050.”

MAKE A DIFFERENCE

Many of us take our water supply for granted. If you are inspired by Ayyappa Masagi’s work, here’s what you can do to conserve water:

• Take a bucket bath instead of a shower
• Use small mugs instead of big ones
• Opt for grey-water harvesting, which reuses water from showers, baths, basins in bathrooms and washing machines for various household applications such as watering gardens and flushing toilets
• Wet commodes before use, to make them slippery. In this way, 2 litre rather than 10 litre per flush is enough to rid them of dirt
• Put bricks inside toilet tanks to reduce the capacity of water being flushed
• Use bottle irrigation for potted plants. Here, fill a 2-litre bottle with water and invert it into the pot so that its open mouth is bored into the mud. The roots will suck in the water as and when they need it as plants take in only as much water as they need. This ensures that water is not wasted and plants get what they want. Once the bottle empties, refill it
• Install roof-water harvesting for your home

HOW DIRE IS THE WATER CRISIS?

India is the second most populous country in the world—with more than 1.2 billion people—but water supply and sanitation are still serious concerns in many parts of the country. With the population expected to rise to 1.6 billion by 2050 and demand for water increasing, the crisis is becoming even more acute. According to programmes conducted by Water.org, an international NGO and pioneer in offering solutions to global water crises, 77 million people in India lack access to safe water. The World Bank estimates that 21 per cent of communicable diseases in India are owing to the use of unsafe water. And a report in The Economic Times points out that it is not only rural areas but even urban cities that face such scarcity—in fact, 22 Indian cities face a water shortage.

However, there is hope by way of efforts in water management in drought-prone areas. Apart from initiatives led by the Government, UNICEF and the community, individual water crusaders like Ayyappa Masagi play an important role in installing water conservation techniques to save water.

One way to make a difference is to adopt grey-water harvesting, which basically means recycling and reusing bathwater and kitchen run-off. Dr Vaman Acharya, retired chairman of the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board, is familiar with Masagi’s work and applauds his grey-water separation technique. “The idea of segregating grey water and reusing it by creating separate pits is sound and logical,” he says. “As the source of this water is bathing, washing and cooking, it contains only soap and detergents, which are not highly contaminated. The water that percolates through these pits ultimately goes into borewells. To prevent this from happening, grey-water separation at source is highly recommended.”

THE WATER FACTSHEET

• A UN report predicts that by 2025, nearly 3.4 billion people will be living in ‘water-scarce’ countries and the situation would become grim in the next 25 years
• As per the Ministry of Water Resources, India has 18 per cent of the world’s population but has only 4 per cent of total usable water resources
• 65 per cent rainwater runoff goes into the sea, which is a major wastage
• In India, agriculture sector is the biggest user of water followed by domestic sector and industrial sector
• As per the Safe Water Network report, India ranks a dismal 120th out of 122 nations for its water quality; and 133rd out of 180 countries for its water availability
• According to Water.org, 77 million people in India lack access to safe water
• The Central Pollution Control Board states that at least 650 towns and cities in India lie along the banks of polluted rivers
• 17 per cent of rural women in India have to walk over a kilometre to reach the nearest water source
• The availability of water has reduced from 6,042 cubic metre in 1947 to 1,545 cubic metre in 2011
• A dripping tap can waste up to 20,000 litre of water every year

Photo: J Ramaswamy
Featured in Harmony — Celebrate Age Magazine
June 2017

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