Shakuntala Devi's pumpkin saga

We don't necessarily need only large scale, expensive measures to address our water woes, says the author

Every time anyone talks about grey water recycling, I remember Shakuntala Devi and her pumpkins. I met her this summer when I went to her village Beni ka Purwa in Banda. She asked if I minded chatting with her while she plucked some vegetables for lunch. Her kitchen garden was lush and not at all what I expected to see in a region that experiences an annual summer drought, during which almost all the wells, ponds and tube wells dry up. Perhaps a shallow underground aquifer lay beneath her house and garden, I mused. But I was wrong.

A couple of years ago, Shakuntala Devi and her husband had dug a deep channel between their tube well and vegetable patch. “We were wasting so much water while bathing, doing laundry of washing dishes,” she told me. “We decided to see if we could use it to water our vegetables.” The channel they dug ended up doing more than simply carrying waste water to their vegetable garden. It kept the soil on either side extremely moist. “So we started planting vegetables and flowers along the channel,” she explained. “Now, even in the dry summer heat, the soil remains so moist that we hardly ever needed to water it.”

Consequently, this year, they had a bumper crop of pumpkins. “Every day we’d find a pumpkin ready to be plucked,” she recounted. “We ended up gifting them to all our family and neighbours.” Additionally, her jasmine and hibiscus plants are thriving. “I’m one of the lucky few here who can pluck flowers every day to place at the altar of our temple,” she said proudly. It’s a far cry from earlier, when the couple could only grow vegetables in winter which didn’t require much watering. Summer vegetables —bottle gourd, bitter gourd and pumpkins of course — had to be bought. Now, Shakuntala Devi’s kitchen expenditure has reduced thanks to the plentiful supply of fresh vegetables from her patch.

However, these aren’t the only rewards that the couple is reaping from their grey water-irrigated vegetable patch. “Every year, we go through a summer of intense drought when animals, trees and sometimes even people die because of the severe lack of water,” she said. “It is in sharp contrast to a time till about 15 years ago when our wells and ponds remained full even in summer.” I asked her if she knew why groundwater reserves in the area had dried up. “Everyone has tube wells now,” she said. “It seems to me that the more tube wells we construct, the less water there is in them.” 

She was spot on. Beni ka Purva, like other villages in Banda district, has seen rampant ground water extraction through tube wells. But in the absence of a technologically sound system of recharge, ground water levels have dipped precipitously. 

The neighbours and family who received the gift of pumpkins from Shakuntala Devi’s garden now have edible proof that grey water can be recycled or reused at home to great effect. It makes me think that we don’t necessarily need only large scale, expensive measures to address our water woes. Perhaps Shakuntala Devi’s effort — low tech, low cost and, most importantly, eminently replicable — could be a potent weapon against water distress, especially in drought-prone areas like Bundelkhand.