Water Matters Mela

A year ago, Auroville’s first Citizens Assembly was convened to develop “A water vision for Auroville and recommendations for its effective implementation”. One of the thirty randomly selected participants was Johnny of Fertile. Initially a reluctant participant, the eight sessions of the Assembly became an immersion for him into the world of water. 

For Johnny, the Assembly felt like “going back to University and studying and concentrating on one subject – it was really cool. It was a treasure hunt and it pricked my conscience.” After the Citizens Assembly concluded, Johnny felt the need to continue learning, so in May a Whatsapp group of twenty of so folk came together, and began making weekly research trips to the water players of Auroville. Johnny recalls that he and Omid visited many farms which were “a revelation”. The larger group also visited Vellore where the Art of Living NGO had done good work on recharging wells. These three months of explorations catalysed that team into some water initiatives: the creation of a theatre piece Tani Illai; the revival of an old compost toilet; and the creation of the water mela (‘mela’ is a fair in Sanskrit).  

The mela was celebrated in Fertile for three days from October 7-9th. Regular water tours were offered, and eight talks were presented by those working with water in Auroville. A range of topics were covered, including Composting Toilets (Dr Lucas), the History of Water Conservation (Raman), the Ocean (Aurofilio) and Desalination (Toby). These events were also live streamed for those unable to get to Fertile. The mela was enthusiastically attended, especially given that it was in the green belt during a rainy week, with around forty people in person and up to fifty watching the livestream. 

Johnny presented five richly painted panels, one for each decade of his Auroville life, which captured the erosion of life lived originally in harmony with water and nature. The first panel portrayed the kolam lake in Kuilapalayam with not a borewell in sight; and with each passing decade, the panels showed the borewells increasing in number. Other panels included our geological strata, and a map of Auroville with all the bore wells pointedly located. 

In true Fertile fashion, artwork was mixed with home-made water engineering objects, including a dynamised water filter and rainwater gauges, and the paints were locally and naturally made by Fertile resident artist Naimeh. Educational panels provided some eye popping statistics, one notable example being that rice needs 3000 litres of water for the production of each kilo, three times more than local millets. 

There was much creativity and outreach: t-shirts printed with the mela logo of a droplet falling alongside a Tamil text ‘Water Festival 2021’; a high-quality photographic exhibition; and a dynamic Instagram page (also used for the livestream) and a newsletter. The one-off mela printout, entitled The Daily Drop, with the telling byline “A limited edition for limited addiction,” highlighted the lowering of the region’s water table in the past three years – the Botanical Garden’s water level has dropped 26 feet, and the Unity Pavilion’s by 25 feet. 

The organisers are focussing on educating young teens. Already children from The Learning Community visit Fertile alongside the ‘unschool kids’ (those not formally going to school). These teens were fully engaged in the mela, and were painting more panels in the days after the festival. Omid, an energetic Fertile artist and one of the organisers, mentioned that they hope to invite young teens from Auroville and bioregion schools to visit and learn about water and the local history of water conservation. 

For Johnny, the challenge of Citizen’s Assemblies is implementation of the decisions. In this context, it’s clear that the work being done by the mela team is furthering some of the good initiatives suggested by the Assembly. The Assembly recommended three projects to work on, and this water team is focussing on two of them. 

The first project is research on the grey water in Mahalakshmi Park, which is currently not being used on-site or in the neighbouring Matrimandir. Johnny recalls that “I knew about this grey water issue, but never put time aside to deal with it.” Omid points out that drinking water is currently utilised in many ways, including in the flushing of toilets, watering lawns and road maintenance; he hopes that grey water can be substituted for drinking water in such applications.

The second project focuses on utilising the previously unused water tank under the Town Hall which, with its 200,000 litres capacity, can capture a lot of rainwater from the roof of the Town Hall. 

The organisers hope to repeat the Water Matters mela in years to come, and see it as part of an ongoing programme to research, educate and develop water conservation strategies. “The ultimate upshot of the mela, with Guilio’s guidance,” noted Johnny, “was that we need to reduce our dependence on bore wells and concentrate on waste water recycling and, most critically, rainwater harvesting.” The programmes for kids will continue, and the play, which was performed over two evenings in October and involved many children, is another way of increasing water awareness.

To have creative, artistic, engineering and theatrical productions emerge from immersion in the topic of water felt like a spring of hope trickling, and hopefully pouring, into what may be an arid and dry future for Auroville and the region if the issue is not addressed urgently.