
Marathwada Drought, 2016
In May 2016, the temperatures of Mumbai reached 42° Celsius, and elsewhere in the state, several communities were severely drought struck. One such place was Devachi Urli, a village 30 km north of Pune in a district called marathwada. This also happened to be the native village of Narendra Mondkar, a household driver of one of the team members, Aditi Raheja. He explained their plight to T.E.A.M in devastatingly simple terms - all 6 of their existing borewells were completely dry. T.E.A.M began asking him a few more questions to realize this was the 8th consecutive year of the land being arid, cattle being parched, crops dying, and villagers losing their income as agricultural activity collapsed. This predicament had the potential to quickly deteriorate further into a precarious socio-economic crisis, and time was of the essence.
After brainstorming together, T.E.A.M. came up with a plan to begin by helping the 800 people in one hamlet of the village. However, when the village panchayat received the offer of assistance from T.E.A.M, they insisted that all 8 hamlets be cared for equally. All of a sudden, T.E.A.M was faced with the overwhelming task of helping over 12,000 people, but the organization took it as a challenge and rose to the task, coming up with a short-, medium-, and long- term solution to the problem at hand.
T.E.A.M. began by raising funds to send 10 truckloads of drinking water to the village every day so that the locals had enough water to meet their basic needs for the next 6 weeks. This was an expensive yet effective temporary solution, as it would allow the villagers to carry on with their domestic activities while also reducing the risk of illness from unsafe water sources. However, when T.E.A.M members arrived at the village and peered into the dry wells, they realized the scale of the challenge. All six wells were relatively shallow, no more than 30 feet in depth, and it was possible that they were entirely exhausted through overuse. After brainstorming, T.E.A.M decided to explore the area and dig deeper to tap into the deep groundwater aquifers prevalent in the Deccan Plateau.
After selecting a site for the bore well, machinery and tools were brought in to detect the presence of groundwater in the area. The locals were confident that the presence of aquatic snakes in the surrounding landscape indicated that there had to be water around, but the challenge was finding out exactly how to access it. T.E.A.M volunteers and the locals began digging, and with the aid of the advanced machinery, the well was soon at a depth of 300 feet. An excited farmer tossed a small rock over the abyss, and the subsequent splash a few seconds later confirmed that T.E.A.M had indeed found water, enough for several months of consumption by the locals.


T.E.A.M. came up with another idea for a long term solution to provide the village with increased resiliency. Using the knowledge that groundwater percolates through the soft soil and is filtered at every layer until it reaches impermeable hard rock, T.E.A.M members came up with the idea of constructing a pit on a dried river channel. This would not only enable rainwater harvesting during the monsoon season but also replenish the aquifers feeding the new bore well, as digging hollow bores 90 feet under the river bed allowed the stored water to percolate through the rock pores. Implementing these strategies in combination with one another was an unprecedented success, and Devachi Urli has been drought-free since 2016 to date.
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