Water culture connection

A conservation-led, integrated development strategy for water to meet SDG 6: clean water and sanitation

Abstract

The increasingly frequent natural disasters in the last decade, are not only symptomatic of climate change, but indicate the critical importance of a holistically overhauling our lifestyles and sympathetically engaging with our built and natural environment. There is an urgent need to actively engage with and analyse the pre-industrial era traditional settlements, as they constitute a three-dimensional record of past wisdom embodying a holistic way of life that reflects a synergetic relationship with nature. The essay explores connect of water and settlements in Indian subcontinent from the Indus Valley civilization to mediaeval times to the colonial and then Independent India. Traditionally in India, land, rivers, fields, groundwater, and forests were all valuable resources and not commodities. Each of the states of India and their traditional settlements are a repository of such knowledge systems for respective climate. By combining 21st Century mapping technologies and regional traditional knowledge systems of water harvesting and management, it is possible to effectively synergise the top-down and ground-up planning policies. Citing examples and experiential learning’s, the essay espouses for conservation led development as preferred planning policy to achieve an equitable, stable, self-sustaining, compassionate, and humane future, as continuum of three thousand years of nature-culture journey.

.