Aakash Ganga: Saving Water for a Rainy Day: India Knowledge@Wharton

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Aakash Ganga: Saving Water for a Rainy Day

Published in India Knowledge@Wharton

The Ganga (or Ganges) is one of India's mightiest rivers, flowing from the
Himalayas in Uttarakhand to the Sunderbans in West Bengal. It is nowhere
near the arid northern state of Rajasthan. It is equally remote from Guiyang
Municipality in the People's Republic of China. But Aakash Ganga – a
rainwater harvesting project that literally means "river from the skies" -- is
making a mark in both places.
In Rajasthan, the project -- backed by the World Bank -- has already been
implemented in six villages. A letter of intent has now been signed with the
state government for its extension to 70 villages, to provide water security to
200,000 people. "Water is the most serious crisis of Independent India," says
B.P. Agrawal, the president of Sustainable Innovations (SI) and the moving
spirit behind the project. In 2007, he founded SI as a non-profit corporation
"to harness innovations for making safe drinking water available to rural
villages and for delivery of healthcare to vulnerable populations". (SI has This is a single/personal use copy of India
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"A plethora of initiatives (water harvesting, water conservation, soil

conservation, etc) exists across India, and many of them are very successful," says S. Vishwanath a civil
engineer and urban and regional planner, who runs Rainwater Club, a website dedicated to rainwater
harvesting. "One needs to look at these initiatives not only technically but also in terms of water literacy
and empowerment. It is about people's understanding of water and how they go ahead to manage it."
Rohini Nilekani, chairperson of Arghyam, a charitable foundation working in the water sector, notes:
"We need a multi-pronged strategy to ensure safe, sustainable water for all and for key economic
activities. Conservation is an important part of this strategy, as is demand management. There are many
and diverse models of conservation and demand management across the country, especially in the drier
regions in Western Gujarat and Rajasthan."
Rajasthan was an appropriate choice for Agrawal for several reasons. It was a personal choice because he
is a native of that state, but more significantly, Rajasthan is known as the Desert State since it rains only
45 days a year. The state has suffered through 40 droughts in the past 52 years. "It is the driest state in the
country having only 1.16% of India's surface water," says Goutam Sadhu, associate professor at the
Jaipur-based International Institute of Health Management Research (IIHMR). Sadhu is the program
director and team leader of the Aakash Ganga project.
"What is the measure of water scarcity?" asks Agrawal, and then answers the question himself: "The
number of bachelors in the village." When water is scarce, women have to walk long distances to collect
it; as a result, families from other villages are reluctant to marry their daughters into such communities.
Not a Drop to Drink…

The scene is different in China's Guiyang Municipality, where Aakash Ganga is now spreading.
"The province is just like Darjeeling -- hilly and green," says Agrawal. "It rains 1,200 mm a year.
(In contrast, the rainfall in Rajasthan could be as low as 150 mm.) Yet, there is no drinking water
since the hills have been converted over the years into farm land. Pesticides and fertilizers have
contaminated the water springs, the main source of drinking water. The contamination is so bad
that the spring water is no longer drinkable."

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The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is supporting an experiment aimed at exploring whether the Aakash
Ganga approach can work in Guiyang. In March, the ADB approved a $50,000 pilot project and
demonstration activities to "demonstrate the full potential of Aakash Ganga self-sustaining rainwater
harvesting". Agrawal, who has just returned from China, says that in some ways things are just the same
as in the villages of Rajasthan. "Samu village has an old tree. Locals claim it to be 500 years old. Like in
India, they tie colorful scarves to this tree. The villagers pray to this tree for good luck and rains."
At Raila village in Rajasthan, they still pray for rains. But their good luck has already arrived. This was
where the first pilot for Aakash Ganga was implemented. The design of the network, filters, construction
methodology, water quality monitoring, technology development and the cost and revenue models were
worked out at the neighboring campus of the Birla Institute of Technology & Science (BITS) at Pilani.
BITS attracted Agrawal because it was from here that he graduated in electrical engineering, before
moving on to the University of South Florida to complete his Ph.D. in 1974. Agrawal, a resident of
Fairfax (Virginia), has worked with companies such as Alcatel, Verizon, General Dynamics and Hughes
Network Systems. He also has two startups to his credit.
Going from starting new ventures for Fortune 500 companies to harvesting rainwater in remote Rajasthan
may seem worlds apart, and Agrawal agrees it was a difficult switch. "But all along I felt I needed to do
something socially relevant," he says.
In hindsight, harvesting rainwater was an obvious choice. The idea got off the ground in 2003 when the
Rajasthan Association of North America, a non-profit organization which aims to promote the culture and
development of Rajasthan, hosted the 2003 New York convention of Rajasthan natives. The Aakash
Ganga proposal was presented to Ashok Gehlot, then chief minister of the state. With his encouragement,
the science behind the scheme was worked out at BITS Pilani. And a support structure was put in place.
The IIHMR, which is already involved in a project styled Aapni Yojana which supplies drinking water to
370 villages in collaboration with the German and Rajasthan governments, looks after Aakash Ganga's
implementation in the villages, procurement of materials and government liaisons. The BITS' Center for
Development of Desert Technologies leads the engineering team. The Bhoruka Charitable Trust is in
charge of community mobilization and micro-financing. And there are several other non-governmental
organizations involved. Sustainable Innovations, which gave a formal structure to the endeavor, was
formed after these initial moves.
World Bank Award

The big boost to the project came in 2006, when Aakash Ganga won the World Bank's Development
Marketplace Award. A $200,000 grant allowed the project to expand operations to other villages. "The
Development Marketplace is a competitive grant program of the World Bank that identifies and funds
early-stage, innovative ideas that exhibit high potential for development impact," says Sanjay Pradhan,
vice-president of the World Bank Institute. "The Aakash Ganga project was selected as one of 30 winning
proposals from more than 2,600 applicants for the 2006 competition."
In 2007, the Indian Prime Minister's Office encouraged Sustainable Innovations to submit a plan for
implementing Aakash Ganga in the "dark zone" of Rajasthan. (Dark zone status means the groundwater
table in the area is significantly below the minimum desired level, and the water quality in the area is
substandard.)
Rainwater harvesting, while not technically complicated, needs careful coordination. Essentially, Aakash
Ganga channels rooftop rainwater from every house, through gutters and pipes, to a network of multi-tier
underground reservoirs. The project has the capacity to collect and store rainwater (with average rainfall)
sufficient for an entire year. In terms of organizational structure, this is a public-private-community
partnership which acquires rights from homeowners to harvest their rooftop rainwater for a fee or subsidy.
The harvested rainwater is supplied to the village according to a socially equitable distribution policy. Part
of the water is used for revenue generation and cost recovery.
Each village needs an investment of $100,000. The materials account for 60% to 65% of the total costs
and labor expenses constitute 20% to 25%. Some 10% to 15% is absorbed by general and administrative

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Aakash Ganga: Saving Water for a Rainy Day: India Knowledge@Wharton
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costs. According to the extension proposal, the government will contribute 70% of the funds. The
community will pay 15% and the other 15% will be raised from private sources. Revenues will be
generated from the fees charged to the villagers for water, and horticulture. These are expected to yield a
surplus of $6,000 to $8,000 a year from the third year. "The cost of harvested water is $0.002 a liter,
based on 25 years of life," says Agrawal. "By comparison, the lifetime cost of bore-well water is $0.04 a
liter."
"Aakash Ganga debunked the myth that people will not pay for water," continues Agrawal. "It weaned
people away from the free water entitlement mindset." Says Sadhu of IIHMR: "This is a significant
transition from the "water is free" mentality to a "water is an economic good" frame of mind." According
to Atul Jain, CEO and founder of the Fairfax-based TEOCO (The Employee Owned Company), which
provides software consulting services to the communications and entertainment industry, "Rajasthan had
elaborate rainwater harvesting systems for several centuries. These systems were abandoned. BP
(Agrawal) researched local folklore to learn the ancient levy system that maintained the rainwater
harvesting systems. A modern version of the ancient levy system became the basis of Aakash Ganga's
economic model."
Tradition and Technology

While the levy system has its roots in history, the project marries technology to tradition. For
instance, satellite images are used to set up a geographical information system. An IT network
manages utilization and monitors water quality. (In China, they are planning to use IT for remote
monitoring; it will be used to turn water taps on and off for individual houses or a cluster of
houses.) Water quality is important, as the experience of Guiyang Municipality shows. "We have
considerably improved the access to drinking water across India in terms of quantity," says
Nilekani of Arghyam. "The next challenge is to understand and deal with complex emerging
quality issues -- fluoride, arsenic, iron and nitrates in addition to bacteriological contamination."
"Before Aakash Ganga, villagers depended solely on the government's water supply schemes which were
not adequate in either quality or quantity," says Sadhu of IIHMR. "The fluoride and TDS (total dissolved
salts) content were much higher than the tolerance level of WHO (World Health Organization) norms.
During the dry season, households have to buy water from water vendors at a cost of $2 per camel cart
(which on the average is the minimum daily consumption of a family). With support from Aakash Ganga,
families now have a secure supply source of drinking water enough for 10-12 months of the year."
"In term of coverage, the project is an enormous success, surpassing its planned objectives by almost
doubling the number of houses included in the rainwater harvesting plan," says Pradhan of the World
Bank. "A total of 119 household tanks were constructed in three villages in the Alwar district in Rajasthan
and an intermediate tank and a recharge well were built. The network stores rainwater sufficient to meet
the drinking water needs of these villages. In broader terms, the project demonstrates an alternative to the
typically inefficient and poor performing public works projects."
Impact on Communities

Agrawal believes that the project has made a bigger contribution than just provision of drinking
water. "Aakash Ganga has gone beyond meeting this basic need," says India Abroad, a New
York-based publication. "Reports from all three villages where Aakash Ganga was (first)
implemented suggest that women have become economically more productive and girls have
attended more classes as they now no longer have to spend a lot of time collecting water," says
Sadhu of IIHMR. "Almost all households with rainwater tanks have established kitchen gardens
which in turn will improve household nutrition and health conditions."
"As a community-driven initiative, the project was very careful in its design to develop a scheme that was
culturally appropriate and attentive to important issues surrounding social caste, class and gender," says
Pradhan of the World Bank. "In that regard the project rates very well given that many other schemes
disproportionately benefit upper class beneficiaries."
Change has happened at several levels. What makes Agrawal proud, however, is that people of different
castes are all participating in the rainwater harvesting scheme and the pooling of water resources. In some

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Aakash Ganga: Saving Water for a Rainy Day: India Knowledge@Wharton
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parts of India, different castes do not even drink water from the same well. "The qualitative measures are
more expressive of Aakash Ganga's social impact and success," says Agrawal. Vishwanath of the
Rainwater Club has a problem here. "I have some reservations about the notion of centralizing water
management," he says. "Traditionally people have been managing their own water and it is good to
empower people to do their own water harvesting." But he agrees that the problem has to be approached
in multiple ways. "Water conservation alone is not the issue," he says. "It is also about demand reduction,
water reuse and recycling. It has to be a combination of all these three. And this is absolutely vital because
of the sheer growth of the economy and the population."
Aakash Ganga's next challenge is to prove that it is scaleable. This is why the China experiment is so
important. There are plans to explore the potential of sites in South Asia. But India will remain the focus
of attention. "We have several initiatives at various stages with organizations such as HSBC, the Royal
Bank of Canada, Google Foundation, Gates Foundation, Coca-Cola Foundation, and PepsiCo
Foundation," says Sadhu of IIHMR. "If one or more work out, the projects will be implemented in
Rajasthan with the same partners and the same approach."
"The entire world has become aware of the shortage of fresh water in some countries and regions," notes
Sadhu. "These include India, with 16% of humanity but less than 3% of global fresh water resources. The
poor water availability is exacerbated by its uneven spread over regions and time of the year. Rajasthan is
very much at a disadvantage even in the Indian context.
"Demand for domestic water use will increase continuously with the growth in population and greater
attention to hygienic and sanitary requirements. A special feature in Rajasthan is its large livestock
population, which will also increase over a period of time. It has had, and will continue to have,
substantial claims on available water supply, between a quarter and a third of the demand for human
consumption. Presently, irrigation accounts for the lion's share of the demand for water. In the
foreseeable future, however, demand for water for other uses (industry, tourism, and recreational and
environmental purposes), which is currently about 3% of total water use, is also likely to increase along
with that for human and livestock consumption," says Sadhu.
Aakash Ganga may be a success, but it is really a drop in the ocean. India's water problems are huge.
According to Nilekani of Arghyam, "Per capita availability of fresh water continues to decline in the
country. Many challenges remain, given the changing nature of the water situation, what with climate
change-related issues, our economic growth, urbanization and the need to have food security over the
next three decades for up to 1.5 billion people. We need to deepen an informed public discourse on these
issues because, whether we like it or not, the situation calls for restraint on water use in the face of
competing claims for a finite resource. We need perhaps to be guided by a water ethic to which we can all
move, from which will derive improved policies and practices that take care not just of human needs, but
also that of other living beings and of course the environmental systems which support life. This means
clear prioritization across sectors and sophisticated water siting plans. Should one locate a new
international airport in a dark water zone as Bengaluru (Bangalore) has done? Should one allow new
mining leases where there is a precarious water balance? These are the tough questions we have to answer
as a society.
"We also need to understand groundwater issues in this country, which remain little understood and
ineffectively backed in the regulatory sense. More than 60% of our agriculture runs on the 20 million
bore-wells around the country, in spite of the vast surface irrigation network we have created. If we
manage this groundwater scientifically and with a spirit of accommodation, it will provide us a vast
reservoir to bank upon during lean monsoons.
"There are solutions, of course and they have been demonstrated. Rainwater harvesting is key, when done
properly," Nilekani says. Agrawal, for one, is confident he can take rural India places under the Aakash
Ganga umbrella.

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