On a balmy February midday, 77-year-old Vaijinath Jagannath Ghongade stood at the banks of the Manganga river in Solapur district, Maharashtra.
“I felt ashamed benefitting from the pension I were given from the agriculture division however doing not anything in go back. Having mirrored for a number of days, I made up our minds to excursion the stretch of the river on foot and learn about its ecosystem,” he stocks.
“For this river, which flows on the subject of my village Wadegaon in Sangola taluka, and helps the livelihoods of loads, was once slowly death,” he provides.
The huge enterprise of cleansing the 75-km stretch of Manganga river flowing from Sangli to Solapur with public participation was once began in 2016. And the person who championed the reason to deliver again the river to its former glory was once Ghongade.
He was once honoured with the Jal Prahari Samman in December 2023 by way of the Ministry of Jal Shakti.
Having a non-public connection and a deep love for the river, right here’s how this water warrior modified the process its destiny and effectively revived it.
Manganga: The river that feeds 5 districts
The rain-fed and East-flowing Manganga river, referred to as ‘Manavganga’ in Sanskrit, rises within the japanese hills of the Satara district and classes via 5 drought-prone talukas. Those are specifically Dahiwadi (Guy), Atpadi, Sangola, Mangalvedha and Pandharpur, sooner than it in the end joins the Bhima River at Sarkoli.
Those drought-prone districts, falling beneath the rain shadow area of Sangli, Satara and Solapur, obtain rainfall ranging between 584mm and 762 mm. It sometimes stories floods too, find it irresistible did again in August 2019 and October 2021.
The gathered silt in Manganga had rendered it shallow and when the downpour was once intense, the river was once not able to hold the rainwater additional downstream, inflicting floods.
“I’ve at all times been eager about the river ever since my formative years. However, staring at it being mired within the silt and thickets with its banks being taken over by way of undesirable plants, disturbed me so much,” he says.
Again in February 2011, Ghongade and a gaggle of 11 different likeminded folks, launched into foot to check the 165-km stretch of the river’s ecosystem and perceive what had to be executed with a river whose watershed house was once round 4,763 sq km. This staff integrated a horticulturist, a botanist, an irrigation specialist, an educationist, a litterateur, an ex-serviceman, and a farmer.
“We undertook the go back and forth to check the soil, water high quality, its availability for irrigation, and the cropping patterns followed by way of the farmers and so forth. Whilst the times have been spent across the river, we slept in panchayat places of work, temple precincts, colleges, group halls or even in farmers’ properties at evening,” says Dr Ashok Shinde, a horticulturist and member of the “Chala Nadi L. a. Zanuya” (let’s get to understand the river) workforce.
Each few kilometres, the workforce contributors took soil and water samples and planted indigenous types of timber. In addition they reached out to the villagers dwelling across the river and trained them on its dismal state. In addition they defined their imaginative and prescient and the stairs to be taken to revive Manganga.
The results of the 21-day go back and forth was once a narrow e-book titled, “Parikrama Mangangechi” (Circumnavigating Manganga) which highlighted the standing of the river and was once bought to university and faculty libraries, scholars, execs and farmers.
Key problems to unravel
The workforce discovered that the river was once not noted by way of the irrigation division for many years and was once now decreased to a sewer. Its riverside was once encroached upon and past the preliminary 30 km, there was once rarely any tree. Acacia and Babul shrubs had taken over the river beds.
The 18 Kolhapur-style weirs, which can be necessarily small dam-like constructions built transverse to the waft of a herbal flow with a substantial hole between two piers to permit passage to the water flow, had grow to be useless because of the layers of silt.
“The villagers dumped their waste into the river. Because the festive season approached, the ones dwelling round it might blank up and sell off their undesirable property into the river,” says Ghongade. “This has been happening for years.”
Ghongade and his workforce went on to ascertain the Manganga Brahmanseva Multipurpose Society in 2014, and with the proceeds from the e-book sale of Rs 54,000, they started the preliminary paintings by way of involving the locals on the grassroots degree.
Because the phrase unfold {that a} Sangola-based septuagenarian was once on a venture to revitalise the Manganga river, farmers, faculty academics, shopkeepers, NGOs, industrialists, sugar barons, charitable organisations, and civil society contributors at massive, got here ahead.
“Having learn the e-book I realised that the duty of revitalising the river may just no longer be executed simply by the shramdan (provider) of a handful of villagers. We would have liked earth movers to do it, and numerous them,” explains Shriharsha Phene, the secretary of the Mumbai-based charitable basis, Shree Brihad Bhartiya Samaj.
Over time it took to wash the river, the basis donated Rs 1.53 crores. Others, too, joined in with their cheques together with the Sangli-based Sadguru Sri Sri Sakhar Karkhana accept as true with, Naam Basis, along side a neighborhood MLA, and a Pune-based industrialist named Sudamrao Bhore, amongst a number of others.
“I used to be born and raised in Sangola’s Wasudh village,” says the 54-year-old Bhore. “And the way may just I no longer give a contribution to the duty undertaken by way of Ghongade sir to restore the river?”
The excavation was once in most cases undertaken all through the summer season months and it took six years to wash the 75-km lengthy stretch of the river and a complete of 20 lakh cubic metres of silt was once got rid of from the river mattress.
“Consistent with the irrigation division officers, it might have value Rs 9 crore, however we did this paintings for not up to Rs 3 crores, due to the financial contribution from the group,” says Ghongade, who braved the summer season warmth to supervise the paintings, 12 months after 12 months, regardless of his complicated age.
Prosperity greeted the area as the consequences bore fruit
Following the downpour in August 2021, the weirs began overflowing. Loads of folks covered up at the river banks, shouting with pleasure!
“It was once a sight we had no longer witnessed in goodbye. We have been most effective hoping that we’d be able to get started farming,” remembers Vithal Chavan (38), a farmer rising wheat and corn on his two-acre plot.
Revitalising the river ended in the extraction of 20 lakh cubic metres of silt, thus bringing again 322 acres of fallow land beneath cultivation. The extremely joyful farmers carried the silt again to their farm plots.
Navnath Dighe (43), of Wadegaon, is without doubt one of the 192 farmers who benefitted from the silt excavated from the river. “I could have taken greater than 600 tractor quite a lot of silt and deposited it on my three-acre plot the place I develop sugarcane the usage of drip irrigation,” says Dighe. In general, he owns 8 acres of land and grows finger millet, corn, in addition to elevating a pomegranate orchard.
The silt, wealthy in vitamins, has yielded a greater harvest. Bablu Ghongade (48), a sugarcane farmer, informs, “I used to get a yield of 35 tonnes in keeping with acre however now it’s round 50 tonnes. It’s all because of the silt from the river.”
The rejuvenation of the river has ended in larger water-holding capability of the KT weirs, and ended in a the within the water degree of one,800 wells and a couple of,500 borewells dotting the river.
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On his subsequent course of action, Ghongade says, “We’re lately tough the removing of the encroachments from the riverbed from the district collector. As soon as got rid of, the river’s width will increase resulting in an build up in its water garage capability, and floods and droughts would possibly grow to be a factor of the previous.”
Edited by way of Padmashree Pande; All pics courtesy: Hiren Kumar Bose