31-year-old A.V. Praveen from Mandya, Arekere Grama, was once a wanted criminal, notorious across almost all police stations in Bengaluru for 14 cases of robberies and 15 others of chain-snatching. Today, however, he is one of the key coordinators of a project, working to give life back to river Vedavathi and the region. With expert ease, he can now take you through the dense forests of Chikmagalur to show you how percolation to increase groundwater levels is the key to the project’s success.
However, this story is not about Praveen. This story is about the man who shaped Praveen into the man he is today. At a workshop for delinquents, Praveen met a man called Nagaraj Gangolli, and that encounter went on to change his life for the greater good.
Nagaraj Gangolli, a full-time instructor at The Art of Living
From assembling parts of HMT wristwatches to reforming prisoners and rowdy sheeters to working with farmers for giving them a decent standard of living, Nagaraj Gangolli has been quietly fighting a war to make lives better on all fronts. His attempt to help farmers led him to work in reviving two rivers in Karnataka: Vedavathi and Kumudvathi, which hold the promise of solving Bangalore’s water scarcity in the future.
At 15, Nagaraj faced the wrath of his family for hanging out with a ‘Harijan’. But that did not change his approach towards life.
A former wristwatch assembler for HMT Watches, Nagaraj, like the timepieces he once adopted as his mainstay, approaches life with confidence and perseverance. Today, he confidently states that his work in rejuvenating rivers in Karnataka is likely to end the century-old Cauvery water dispute with neighbouring Tamil Nadu, two years from now.
However, by 2004, Nagaraj was a full-time instructor with The Art of Living, teaching meditation and life tools for a happier and stress-free for various people and communities — from Dalit communities to cops, even hardened criminals and pencil-pushing state bureaucrats who initially refused to associate with any of it. Thanks to the various projects spearheaded by Nagaraj in slums, jails, and villages, thousands of people have reclaimed their life with renewed self-esteem, dignity and honesty. Praveen, for instance, now leads a respectable life and has also earned much appreciation from police personnel, including Inspector General of Police (IGP) Alok Kumar, for improved behaviour.
People from villages rallied around Nagaraj to clean up village ponds and store rainwater
Despite facing a lot of difficulties to get funds for his projects, he did not give up. He found out about the Government of India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 (NREGA) scheme that is a legislative mandate for the government to fund important and locally relevant infrastructure projects. Under the Act, the Government also provides an employment guarantee to the locals.
But the watershed moment, literally and figuratively, came in 2011 when he worked on a small project in helping 100 odd farming families in Lakshmipura village in his home district to improve their access to groundwater, raising the level from 350 ft to 80 ft. He had witnessed how the challenge of water scarcity can be solved on a permanent and sustainable basis by taking a scientific approach to the problem. He would later find that even when monsoons fail to deliver the annual promise, water scarcity can be resolved. This lesson came three years later when he started work on the Vedavathi basin project under the River Rejuvenation Project of Art Of Living. Even with nearly a third of the regular monsoon rains received that year, the parts where the project was implemented, saw groundwater rise from 700-1200 ft to 100-150 ft. With this success, he began working on phase two of the project which now covers 1,097 villages, 24 village panchayats and 25 lakh people.
Community participation by individuals and governing bodies have provided an easy solution to complex problems Nagaraj’s effort to rejuvenate rivers
During his travel through the interiors of Karnataka, Nagaraj saw that scores of villages had the same story of water woes. Despite a good rainfall of 3000-4000 mm, there was acute water shortage everywhere. Rivers, ponds and borewells had dried up.
When he found that water in Chikmagalur had very high fluoride content and was not fit for drinking, Nagaraj had a meeting with the village leaders and the youth, who rallied around him to clean up the village ponds and store rainwater. This clean water was further routed to percolation pits through pipes. 20 new ponds were created, as a result of which the groundwater level came up naturally. Nearly 8,000 litres of water that was being wasted daily is now used to recharge groundwater and keep the water table high.
Community participation by individuals and governing bodies (gram panchayat and gram sabha) has not only provided an easy solution to complex problems but also empowe…
