THE PUBLIC WELL REVIVAL MOVEMENT WANTS PEOPLE IN TAMIL NADU TO RECONNECT WITH THE ANCIENT SUSTAINABLE SOURCE OF DRINKING WATER

The group has revived 15 defunct wells over the past four years, with crowd-funding.

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We trek up a trail, on a hillock composed of damp, loose rock that cuts into finger millet fields, to reach Giri’s tile-roofed home. It is within the many folds of Erode district’s Bargur hills of the Western Ghats in Tamil Nadu. He is not home, but his goats are. “Women walk up this stretch with a pot of water balanced on their hips up to 10 times a day,” points out Madhu Manjari Selvaraj when we pause to catch our breaths near the goat shed. The world over, it is women who take it upon themselves to fetch water. It is no different in the mountain village of Solakanai.

Here, women walk to a mountain stream for water every day. A few metres from the stream is their village well that, until a few months ago, was covered with boulders and sediment. It now brims with water and the promise of a new beginning after Manjari and her team from the Public Well Revival Movement took it into their fold. A handful of men used rocks sourced from the nearby hills to build a wall against the flow of the stream, after which the well was dredged, with a wall constructed around it. It was opened last month.