Children, women from tribal villages help water conservation

In a unique initiative, village children, youngsters and women in tribal villages living around six tiger reserves in central India came out to provide water for wildlife.

Under the banner of Satpuda Foundation, they seek to clean and de-silt around 76 existing waterholes, build 38 new check dams and construct seven new waterholes.

“We have been regularly doing this since 2005. But with our spread in the Satpuda Landscape with the financial assistance of Born Free Foundation, the activity has taken a shape of community movement now after 11 years,” Kishor Rithe, President of Satpuda Foundation, said.

“A total of 38 check dams were built during 2015-16 using locally available materials. These dams, mostly built on streams, help retain water and recharge the water table. Some of them provide drinking water to domestic animals and those close to forest provide water to wild animals,” he stated further.

Volunteers comprising adult villagers, members of SHGs that we had mentored and children from village schools started building check dams after November 2015, Rithe said.

Anoop Awasthi, Assistant Director (Conservation) told that the foundation’s water conservation programme has also addressed the issue of human health and cleanliness. “We dug a total of 45 soak pits across the landscape. The soak pits, dug next to wells/hand pumps in villages, collect spillover and run-off water and help recharge the water table, thereby addressing the human health and human-wildlife conflict issues,” he said.

The foundation teams have been working in more than 120 buffer villages of Tiger Reserves like Pench Maharashtra, Pench Madhya Pradesh, Navegaon-Nagzira, Satpuda, Tadoba-Andhari and Kanha Tiger Reserve spread across the Satpuda landscape.