Water structures

India has a monsoon climate: lots of water for a few months, and little for the rest of the year.

So for thousands of years people have built structures to collect, store and share water.

These range from a simple village pond to the Grand Anicut. They look very different from place to place, because the land is different: Himalayan foothills, the Thar Desert, the Gangetic plains, the Western Ghats, the Deccan plateau, the Northeast.

The story again begins with the Harappans. Dholavira had large reservoirs (big water stores).

The Harappans also solved a tricky problem with wells. Water soaking into the earth around a well pushes its walls inward.

Their answer: trapezoid-shaped bricks (wider at one end) that lock together. Laid in a ring, wide side out, they cannot be pushed inward, so the well does not collapse.

Shringverpur in Uttar Pradesh is the Śhringaverapura of the Rāmāyaṇa, where Rāma, Sītā and Lakṣhmaṇa crossed the Ganga. Digging there found a set of large, connected reservoirs.

They were filled through a channel from the Ganga when the river flooded. Flood water is muddy. So the first one or two tanks let the silt (fine mud) settle at the bottom, and cleaner water flowed on to the next. Even so, how the whole system worked is still not fully understood.

Later, stepwells were built in Gujarat and Rajasthan. There they are called vāvs or bāorīs: steps lead down, level after level, to the water. Rani ki Vav in Gujarat has several pillared levels and hundreds of beautiful statues.

Stepwells did more than store water. They were also social spaces: down the steps it was cooler, so people sat together and shared the news.

Temples had their own water tanks, called puṣhkariṇīs, for collecting water and for water rituals.

Today many of these old structures are in trouble:

• their water sources have dried up;
• they are badly looked after;
• they suffer from pollution and rubbish dumping.

Environmentalists, local people and NGOs sometimes join hands to save them, but much more is needed.