THE WATER FESTIVAL " Pani Ki Kahani "
Nancy L. Galloway

For at least a week after the water festival, I would wake up in a lather after having dreamt of being tied up and tortured by some government water board official.  Really, though, the water festival Development Alternatives put on was fun, and I have far better memories of it than my dreams would suggest.

For three days, the Lake Park in Sarojini Nagar, Delhi was transformed into an educational fair designed to create an awareness of water resources among 4th, 5th and 6th class students, and give them some means of improving the outlook  for water in the capital.  The park itself, with its long man-made waterway, was an ideal backdrop for the festival.  The waterway, serene and beautifully clean, and the large flock of geese resident there, served as reminders that water is not just something for people to drink or wash with; water is also a home for living creatures.

The waterway was the location for our sailboat races.  The 5,700 students who attended during the three days made tiny paper boats and cheered them on lustily. A few brought exotic boats they has made at home, some with big bright sails, and one was even battery-powered (it tended to go in circles, though).  There were surprise finishes, with laggards coming from behind to win at the very last.  This was very exciting stuff.

One of the sights that I’ll always remember from the festival was of one of our senior school volunteers -- they escorted the sections around the Festival -- standing thigh-deep in the lake, her uniform skirt floating on the water.  She was running one of the sailboat races, and you had to stand in the water to do it right.  All her little charges were standing on the banks, screaming their heads off for their boats, and she was having a great time.

One of the most popular attractions at the festival was the Underwater Cave.  Two very talented art students created wonderfully colourful models of creatures which live deep in the sea.   We had an octopus, sea slugs, scallops, sea urchins and all sorts of fish.  These were in a setting which duplicated the feel of a cave underwater, with seaweed, coral, glimmering light, and fish swimming by.  The children could walk through this underwater environment, and emerge dry as dust at the other end!

The children were also encouraged to create their own models. There were two general categories:  One was sailboats, and the second was of anything to do with water.  They tackled these  with enormous enthusiasm, so we were nearly buried in models.  Small children would come staggering in under working irrigation models that were nearly as large as they were, or with glass cases protecting a ship made entirely out of square five paisa coins.  By the end of the second day, we had two tents completely filled with models, and the control room tent was half filled with posters and poems.  Our judges for the competitions were hard-pressed to narrow the field down to three winners in each category.  All the cash prizes had been donated by   the Steel Authority of India.  Our judge for the poster competition, Dolly Narang of the Village Gallery in Hauz Khas Village, decided to donate additional cash prizes herself, so that more children could be recognized.

We also  had a water knowledge quiz competition, based on the information contained in the book of classroom activities which we sent to participating schools.  This competition was hard fought indeed, so much so that we ended up sharing the first prize between two teams.  Neither  could be stumped.  All the teams were very impressive, and we would have liked to have liked to have given all the competitions prize.  Our feeling was that all who took part in any of the contests came away a winner just by learning more about their world and how it works.

The children could take part in a number of hands-on-activities during the festival.  There were scientific ones: aquifer-in-a-jar demonstrated how ground water works, how it becomes polluted and why it is so important to us.  The Central Pollution Control Board showed how to do water testing, and talked about water quality and what shouldn’t be in water.  A video camera hooked up to a microscope let a whole section at a time see the tiny bugs that live in pond water, so they could better understand the full range of living organisms, visible and invisible, that depend upon water.

Children got to star in their own video productions as well, when we invited them to be filmed saying a few words about water and the environment.  This reminded me of what the American artist Andy Warhol said, that through TV “everyone will be famous for five minutes.”  For many children, this was their five minutes.

One of the most heart warming experiences of the festival came at the end of the second day, when an NGO school from the far edge of Delhi arrived five hours late.  We are about to close when in trooped 30 tired children and their teachers.  They had had endless problems with their transport, then had got lost.  We were just so pleased they made it that all of us escorted them around the festival.  They made a wonderful tape in the video tent, with several of the tiniest children proudly reciting poetry about the environment.  At the end of their visit, we are able to give them each a box lunch, through the generosity of the Maurya Sheraton Hotel which donated all the food for the volunteers.  The festival was spiced with lovely occurrences like this.

Recycling was a prominent programme during the festival.  Nek Chand, the creator and director of Chandigarh’s famous Rock Garden, came to show children what sorts of art works could be made out of recycled waste.  We had a steel mesh wall festooned with colourful plastic bags, birds and beads made of fabric scraps, and garlands for parties made of carefully folded plastic bags. Nek Chand was so pleased to be with us working with these children, and he made them - and us - feel very special.

We were fortunate to have many excellent exhibits from the Central Water Commission, the Central Ground Water Board, the National Water Development Agency, and the Central Pollution Control Board.  The industry too participated: SAIL had a display on its environmental programme, and NuChem Weir demonstrated its desalination process.

The low-tech side was represented with models of soak pits simple water purification methods.  The exhibits were well explained by knowledgeable personnel from all these organizations, and the children peppered them with questions, which made the exhibitors happy.

Entertainment was ongoing throughout the festival, with eight performances each day by dancers, magicians, puppeteers and a theatre group.  The children were encouraged to become involved, to shout at the puppets or performers and dance with the dancers.  The performances all dealt with water; the theatre group dramatized the situation of poor water, polluted and diseased and how she (water) could be saved.

Early on the morning of the third day, we had a visit from students in a school for handicapped children.  They had their own special tour, after which they had a chance to play on the stage, making environmental announcements over the sound system.  This made a great hit with them.  they are active participants, bringing a stack of drawings they had made for the poster competition. This was the first time Development Alternatives had ever attempted such a large exhibition on its own, and the way was fraught with peril.  Our model was a guide on how to organize a water festival put out by the US organization, the Nebraska Groundwater Foundation.  This was an invaluable source of information, and prevented many problems.  We have put this book into an Indian context, and it is for sale to any organization which might like to do its own festival.  We had invited many NGOs from around the country to come help at the festival, so they could see first-hand what it was all about, and several did come.

One of the hardest parts was raising funds. We had originally thought that it would be natural for industries involved with water to donate to such an effort, so we approached them first.  We went to makers of water filters, storage tanks, engineering firms which undertook water projects, and so on.  Over 200 industries were approached.  The bottlers of soft drinks had the most ingenuous outlook.  They said, “We’re not concerned with the people who drink water, only the people who drink sodas.”  When I inquired what percentage of their products was water, however, I was told “96 percent”. but they still failed to see a connection.

After several months of fruitless fund-raising, I turned to our traditional donors, the UN organizations and bilateral donors, and raised the required amount quite quickly and painlessly.  My thanks to all our donors: the Royal Netherlands Embassy, the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, UNICEF, SAIL, Straw Products and the Maurya Sheraton Hotel.  Their help made this effort possible.  We believe this festival has helped the students who attended to form a rather different value systems, one with more knowledge of and respect for the natural world around them.

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