Innovation for Dignity, FoodSecurity, ClimateResilience

In 1999, we didn’t know “D” of Design; our poor women farmers have to save their crops from flood and drought. It was their life and death challenge. And that was our design challenge. •Inspiration: Our solution should defeat drought by flood water be #motherearth friendly be gender-centric in execution/operation/scaling ensure #NoPoverty #ZeroHunger #GenderEqaulity #ClimateAction ensure #MahatmaGandhi’s Antyodaya principle •Ideation: it should be cost-effective/easily-replicable/energy-independent/ illiteracy-inclusive/open-sourced knowledge (for every farmer) •Implementation: it works for any landholding (0.50-100 acres), any waterlogging volume (0.1-100Mlts), any geological formation (sand/hard rock/alluvial etc), any local materials/items/instruments/tools/skills/machines, any crops/any soil/any agro-ecology zones/local skill sets easy to understand/maintain/monitor

BHUNGROO takes away excess flood water from farmlands, filters, inject and stores that water within conformable subsoil zones by #AquiferStorageRecovery #ManagedAquiferRechargeRecovery and #VerticalDrainage principles for reuse of that stored water during drought. Owing to zero financial and technical resources, women farmers brought in their traditional/local knowledge and operating skills in conducting technology-field-trials. In next 7 years, we were successful to identify and modify each of our design problems; successfully came up with 17 designs, each design is having minimum 4 variations to ensure #ZeroHunger #NoPoverty of our women farmers across agro-ecological zones of India SEAsia, EAsia & Africa.

When technology is delivering miracles in form of defeating drought by flood, #NoPoverty and #ZeroHunger, The designs bring in following high water mark impacts 1.Tangible: Cost-effectiveness, zero gestation gap, zero-inventory assembling, tailor made, 2.Intangible: Confidence building of unschooled women that they can create world class design thru their inherent skill, local materials/instruments, gender-centricity, self-creation ensures ownerships, peer support wipes out farmers’ suicides 3.Policy: being part of India government’s NRLM policy it is now poised to impact 55 million rural women for 2X crop income 4.Replication: skilling of local hands implying creation of new markets

•Traditional Knowledge ensures 200X efficiency: a.Observing pressure on 2 months pregnant ladies’ belly button when they carry 20 lts water pot on their heads (during walking), rural unschooled women defined land’s steepness. It saved time & cost by 200 times and brought in result accuracy. b.Observing depth, taste and color of exiting well-water, local community explains subsoil hydrological regime=cautioning non-interference zones within useable water table at varied depth •Knowledge Democratization: Through visual literacy, local unschooled youth learnt state-of-the-art Resistivity and Subsoil imaging machine for defining subsoil strata, cavity shapes for water storage & storage duration •Repurpose: using discarded local items viz coir materials for siltation chamber (and reusing the same for organic fertilizers), bird feathers, moringa leaf, seeds, stones, pebbles, sands for filtration system construction. •Local hands: Designs have been created to accommodate #Plastic #PVC #UPVC #HDPVC, #CI #RI #CementPipe and #CementLiningPipe; Majority are sourced from discarded pipes. their perforations done by local hands. •Design brings Dignity: 5-12 women-headed families co-own each unit. First time in their life they get water; through water-right they reclaim their Land-right. #LandRight to rural poor women brings in Dignity. Thus, these vulnerable women could reclaim their dignity through appropriate Design