Manu Moudgil

Ramkaran Sharma built a new house three years back. From one room and kitchen on a terrace, his family graduated to three rooms, a bigger kitchen and a separate toilet and bathroom. Still, Ramkaran prefers to go out in the fields to relieve himself. “I like to take a long walk.

Take the roads of Punjab during the monsoon and you will find most fields turned into pools of water. It’s mainly the water pulled out from the underground vault to support the kharif crop of paddy.

Dhanmaniya Devi had never tasted a ‘good’ fish. “All we had during my childhood were the small varieties which come to rivers during monsoon. They are rarely seen now,” says the 65-year-old villager in Sildag of Palamau district in Jharkhand. This is why when her family reared the commercial variety fish last year, she was delighted.

Summers get hotter, rains decline and crops fail. The conflict between people increase and migration in search of better lands and skies begin. Sounds familiar? We are not talking about Marathwada here. This is how the lives of our ancestors played out thousands of years ago.

Gajanand Sharma is excited about the monsoon this year. He is building an anicut on the small stream that runs through his farm. “After the rain, the land will be filled with water and then I will sow wheat and reap record production in this area,” he prophesises. This forecast doesn’t come from his knowledge of astrology, but that of geology, gained over the years.

With two consecutively weak monsoons, this summer is particularly difficult for India. 

Rapid growth in population, agriculture production, industrialisation and urbanisation have put an extreme burden on India's dwindling water resources. Water-guzzling paddy covers maximum gross area under cultivation at 44 million hectares.

Forts and palaces of Rajasthan are well known for their water-based architecture, which sustained life and also kept out the extreme summer heat. Though mostly absent from travel itineraries, Deeg Palace in Bharatpur district scores over the big names when it comes to aquatic ingenunity.

Every night, an incandescent bulb lights up the terrace room of a house in Lalitkhera village in Haryana. Insects from the adjoining pond swarm to this solitary bright spot under which Sheila Devi sits with a cup and saucer in her hand.

“This is my business, I am nobody’s slave,” says Kapal Nishad. He is one of the over two million migrants who came to Punjab over 20 years ago.