This article is written by Hassan S Islam, based on his experiences from walking along River Luni (Pichiyak to Ajmer) as part of our Moving Upstream: Luni Fellowship programme. He undertook this journey with co-fellow Madhuri Sharma. Please note that the reading time is ~ 10 minutes (with lots of visuals).
All photos used in this piece are by Hassan S Islam (unless specified otherwise).
Cover photo: The Govindgarh Reservoir near the city of Ajmer. The reservoir was to store water run-off along the Luni, but now, is filled up primarily with untreated sewage from Ajmer.
"Pehle Luni Nadi ki paani dhoodh jese saman tha aab koi na hove."
Earlier, water in the Luni river was like milk.
- Goparamji Jat (65), Udaliyawas
Metaphors captivate me. As an actor, I have been taught to connect with the emotions of words, and use metaphors to fire up the imagination. Now as a student of conservation science, I try to communicate the state of nature that I observe and study.
As my fellow walker Madhuri Sharma and I prepared to embark on a 14-day walk along the River Luni, I had imagined the river only as a stream of sand. Being from the wet, green landscape along the Brahmaputra in Assam, I’ve harboured a deep fascination with the image of silhouettes of camels traversing dunes as the sun sets.
But through the walk, we found the river sustaining with green vegetation, trees and farmlands. Sometimes, even patches of water. It was neither a river in the conventional sense, nor was it just an arid scar in the desert landscape.
While it may have contrasted with my vivid imaginations of a desert river, the metaphors employed by those staying along its banks – including Goparamji – brought the Luni to life.
Under the lens of suspicion
“Aanzano se satarq rehna, kisipe bharsa mat karna.”
Beware of strangers. Don’t trust them
- Omprakash, Jaswant Sagar Dam
We started our walk from Pichiyak Jaswant Sagar dam, and the plan was to walk to Luni’s source at Ajmer, some 130 km away.
From the very first step, it felt like something was amiss. It took time to adjust to the landscape, the harsh winter sunlight, and groups of people stopped in their tracks to stare at us. It even took time to adjust to what a dam on a dry river might look like.
A 40-feet bund was all that marked Jaswanth Sagar dam. The reservoir was empty. Instead of the gleam of water, the reservoir had neat squares of farmlands that stretched out to the horizon.
“The entire landscape becomes green when it rains,” said 21-year-old Saqil Ahmed. His field is nearby, within the reservoir and within the Luni. Today, he was among those preparing to host a religious event on an open ground within the reservoir.
During this brief period of rains, farmers cultivate maize, beans, wheat, ragi, mustard, millet, sorghum (jawar), fennel (sauf), cumin (jeera), potato and onion. “But it has not rained well for some time. The river has stopped flowing and the groundwater table is very low,” he says. Now, farmers primarily grow mustard, millets, fennel and sorghum – a delicate attempt to balance economics with water usage.
A little distance away, the fields faded away and the arid river bed came to sight. There was a great stillness and silence. It seemed otherworldly, surreal. I felt like this was an alien landscape, much like what Neil Armstrong probably felt when he first stepped on the moon.
Living on the Luni
"Na zameen hai, Na zayedaat, Khai - kharan, mazdoori karo aur pet varo. Yeh koi zindagi hai?"
"We don’t owe any land, not any secured - satisfying shelter, labouring, only labouring and full your stomach. Is it a life?"
- Manju Devi, who lives with her family on the Luni
Luni’s bed is marked with high, dense growth Khejri trees. The agriculture fields around are bordered by barbed wire fences. The dried river bed was a highway of sorts for the unhindered movement of Nilgai and other animals.
The bed also provided space for humans – particularly marginalised communities who found no space in the settlements nearby.
At Nimbol, some 30km into our walk, we found the thatched hut of a Banbagariya family right in the middle of the riverbed. The Banbagariyas are a semi-nomadic tribal community, often considered to be among the poorest communities in Rajasthan. Here, they lived in a modest single-room circular hut, surrounded by a wooden picket fence. Three women and a baby sat on a khatia (a traditional cot) under a Khejri tree.
They have been living here for years, and despite drought or storm, they’ve continued staying on the river bed. Rearing a few goats and chickens for subsistence, they work as daily-wage workers in the farms nearby. They walk miles to fetch drinking water. Without land, they seemed to have little identity.
Manju Devi, who is perhaps in her 30s, told us: “We don’t have a voter ID or an Aadhar card. We don’t have land that we call our own.”
The river bed is also one of the few places where pastoralists can allow their livestock to graze without worry. Karnaram Devasi, a shepherd who was wearing traditional attire including the bright red pagri (turban), let out a series of sharp noises to get his flock’s attention. “Aeh – ahe – aeii – aeii” rang out on the river bed.
There was a time when he reared camels, travelling even as far as Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh for his trade. “The use of camels was reduced once tractors and motor vehicles became common. It is costly to rear a camel, and we just couldn’t earn through them,” he said.
He folded an aakda leaf (Calotropis procera – a hardy plant found in dry ecosystems) into a conical shape. He offered us tea in this makeshift cup. “Now, I rear only sheep, but even this is not economically profitable. The demand for this wool has reduced,” he said. “I want my children to find other ways of earning a living.”
The cycles of water and sand mining
“It is our people who work in the mines for little money, but the profits are going to those who operate these networks out of Jodhpur.”
A local sand miner, between Govindgarh and Alniyawas.
Towards Alniyawas, the midpoint of our journey, the river seemed to be hollowed out. All around us were signs of extensive sand mining.
The river bed had been dug some 50-60 feet, leaving tall columns of exposed sand. The roots of the trees were exposed. Those we met along the way said the river had not flowed here for decades.
Through the walk, we had been told about the “sand mafia” and their violent crimes, including gruesome murders.
I started to see the habitation around us through a different lens. While we walked through villages, I noticed that traditional mud-buildings were rapidly replaced by modern concrete and brick buildings. The traditional buildings we entered were cooler and more suited for the weather here. But, they needed much more maintenance and weathered faster. Modern buildings looked better and were sturdier. But they needed a lot of sand – from places like the Luni river bed.
It also reminded me of cities like Guwahati which I call home and Bengaluru where I stay now. The cityscape is just concrete. These are cities built on mined sand – sand extracted from far away rivers. It’s easy in these landscapes to forget the costs of our comfort. Our comfort, it seems like, is someone else’s tragedy.
It’s also easy to put the blame on locals for extraction and to ignore the factors that push them into sand mining. On the tenth day of the walk, we encountered another heavily mined zone. This time, it was an active mining zone.
A few sand miners immediately came towards us. We were interrogated until some form of tenuous trust was established. Eventually, we felt bold enough to ask them about sand mining. One of them replied: “Due to the low availability of water, we can’t make a living in agriculture. And so, sand mining remains our only viable option.”
We would run into sand miners many times during our walk. At one point, we sensed that such a group had taken our pictures on their phones. When Madhuri asked them about it, they denied having done so.
We felt tense, but managed to assure them that we were not there to keep a tab on sand mining. They let us walk away, but we were shaken: were our photos still on their phones?
As Luni changes, so does water access
“Khet-khet mai kuwan hai, par paani naawe”
Every field has a well, but there is no water in it.
- Ramdiram Mali (55), Jasnagar.
I mull about the cycle of poverty, drought, Luni and mining. “If Luni flows, it will end unemployment here,” Mahavir Singh, Sarpanch of Lambiya village, told us
Consecutive seasons of low rainfall had dried up wells, making agriculture nearly impossible. Borewells were at 400 feet, with some villagers saying the groundwater table was declining by 20 feet a year. Much of the youth chose to or were forced to migrate to bigger cities for work.
Around Pichiyak and Anadpur Kalu, at the start of our walk, houses nearly always had a huge tank attached to it. These stored rainwater – and in a couple of places, we were even offered “last year’s rain water” which was still sweet. But, as we walked closer to Ajmer, in villages like Jasnagar, we saw a greater reliance on piped water supplied by the government.
Consequently, there were fewer rainwater harvesting tanks. These pipelines, however, are unreliable: with water available 3-4 days a week. The piped supply, often through borewells dug deep into the ground, are heavy on fluoride, complained villagers.
“The tap is far away and we get only little time to collect water in our pots,” Koma Devi in Jasnagar said. She points at her swollen ankles: “I have to make multiple trips with a heavy pot on my head.”
From Alniyawas, towards Ajmer, the riverscape of the Luni started to change. Gravel gave way to larger rocks and boulders. Small water bodies formed naturally on the river, where birds perch and where Nilgais wander. The surrounding vegetation became denser.
The open wells we observed here were filled with water; and we could even hear the movement of groundwater in them. We came across a 3 feet high check dam and were surprised to find a large amount of water behind it. A little ahead, we saw the vast expanse of water stored in Govindgarh dam.
We spent the afternoon with fishermen who had come from West Bengal and Bihar. The government handed out a tender to fish in the reservoir and it was 34-year-old Naushad, a local who has a farm near the dam, who won it.
Naushad was surprised when we showed them pictures of the barren reservoir of Pichiyak, the next major dam on the Luni some 90km downstream. Naushad started to wonder about the state of other reservoirs, and was shocked to learn that Luni is dry otherwise.
But as shimmering as the Govindgarh reservoir looks, it is too contaminated to be used for drinking. “It can only be used for fishing. It is basically water from the sewers of Ajmer,” said Mahesh Kumar, a Panchayat Field Worker. The village instead relies on piped water drawn from the Indira Gandhi canal that carries water from the rivers of Punjab into Northern Rajasthan.
There are four dams around the river Luni in and around Govindgarh. It is only now that the small ponds (called naadis) are being prepared to store rainwater for the community, said Kumar.
The filthy origins of the Luni
Though we call Luni a ‘river’, it is nothing but a drain.
- Jagdev Gurjar (24), Sarpanch, Doomara
Towards Ajmer, the landscape became greener. Grasslands by the foot of the Aravallis were coated in pink flowers. The Aravallis here aren’t barren and rocky, but are green and vibrant; made even more heavenly by the wisps of fog that hung around its peaks. The wells we saw had plenty of water in them. Lantana Camara, an invasive species native to Mexico that has come to dominate the sub-continent, was omnipresent.
The Luni was filled with water. But looks can be deceiving. There was a putrid smell.
On the surface, it seemed like the farms were unaffected. Paddy fields were green all around, and there were vast cultivations of marigold. But, Ramratan Choudhry, took us to his farm and showed us the yellowing of his crop. “This is due to the polluted waters here. We have water in the wells, but it is full of chemicals. We can’t use it for the crops, let alone to drink,” he said.
The change was not just in the Luni, but also in what was being offered to us as food. Early in the walk, the staple at lunches and dinner were rotis made out of bajra (Pearl Millet). These were less water intensive and withstood periods without rains. But in the last few days, as some water accumulated in the Luni, we were offered rotis made out of wheat primarily.
Closer to Ajmer, one of the primary tributaries that form the Luni is known as Sabarmati. This is supposed to be the origin of the river, but from our point of view, having walked nearly two weeks now upstream of the Luni, it seemed like we were traversing towards its death.
Farms were now interspersed with concrete houses. We could no longer walk along the river’s banks which either had houses built on it or were fenced off. There was garbage everywhere. The roads were noisier, more frantic and dirtier. The tranquility of the rural countryside was seemingly over. City life – which I have been used to for so many years now – seemed so jarring after two weeks in the tranquil countryside.
When we spotted the river, we were shocked to see it transformed. For a moment, it seemed like small icebergs – like the one we see in documentaries of the Arctic – were floating on the blackish surface. These were chemical effluents. Eventually, the Luni at the start of its journey was just a canal filled with green, black and yellow fluids.
We ended our walk at Anasagar lake in the heart of Ajmer, which is believed to be the source of the Luni. The lake is a typical urban water body: controlled, barricaded and used merely for aesthetics.
I spent a few moments in silence pondering about the kindness and love we’d received from villagers despite the obvious scarcity of water, food and income. There are parks all around the banks of Anasagar; and we hear the laughter of tourists who are flocking in to take pictures. The lake looks full; its surface blue, but the water was polluted and stagnant. At that moment, it felt so ironic and tragic to have spent two weeks talking about the water crisis downstream
Hassan Shahnowaz Islam is a Moving Upstream fellow who spent time walking along River Luni, as part of Veditum’s Moving Upstream Fellowship program along River Luni, that we co-hosted with the School of Public Policy, IIT Delhi, and was supported by Out of Eden Walk & A4Store. To read more about our Moving Upstream project, click here.
If you’d like to commission stories from this walk, please write to the author (rawstartrgfti@gmail.com) or email us at asid@veditum.org
To read published stories from other sections of the walk, click here.
Mohit Rao & Siddharth Agarwal mentored and guided the fellows. Mohit has provided strong editorial support to Hassan in the writing of this piece. The Luni Fellowship has been held together in collaboration with Prof. Pooja Prasad.
This piece can be re-published (CC BY-NC-SA) with a line mentioning ‘This was originally published on Veditum’ and a link back to this page. In case of re-publishing, please alert asid@veditum.org
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