Client / Financial Support: Winrock International/Ford Foundation
Duration: 30 mins

There is an accelerating water scarcity in large parts of rural India. The foremost attempt to tackle the problem has revolved around involving local communities in reviving traditional tanks and creating additional water storage structures. The attempt is to slow the speed with which water runs off degraded mountainsides. Get water to walk not run. And in the process help recharge Indias depleting acquifers.

But rural communites are riven with internal divisions and these divisions work to hinder such attempts to decentralize the conservation and management of water. Small Remedies takes a closer look at the challenges of watershed conservation in rural India, specifically within the context of the caste and class based divisions that characterize Indian society.