Laxman has recognized the effectiveness of culture and traditions for vehicles for popularizing and spreading his methods. "People used to worship various trees and decorate ponds as they would worship a god," he said. "They considered the earth as their mother."
"But these traditions started fading away. People earlier would give a name to the pond, just as you name a child, they would name the pond. But slowly people were just not bothered – they would not care about . . . whether there would be water in the pond or whether the embankment had been broken. The government comes and builds ponds. People defecate around the pond. The pond breaks down because of soil erosion and people are just not bothered.
"But we linked these ponds with our customs and with our traditions. We created these ponds. When we started working, we would work on these ponds, name the pond, plant trees around the pond, decorate the pond.
"People tie threads around trees and vow to protect them and repair the embankments around ponds. . . . People, they have tried to decorate the pond. They have built a temple here. They worship the pond, so that it is totally in keeping with the custom – the tradition. If you worship something, if you want to make it beautiful, then you try to sustain it. It would be a sacred place and people would try and keep the area around the pond clean.
"We feel that we have achieved what we set out to do, in the sense that we have built a
relationship with nature. We are trying to do away with social evils, like people wanting to cut trees, not respecting their elders."
Singh relies largely on social events and Padyatras (extensive tours on foot), organized by villages, to review the work of individual communities. Every year, on Devyuthan Gyaras, the day marked by tradition for the worship of ponds, a large cohort of youth water technicians, village leaders, and other involved villagers travel to over 80 villages to revive the oral traditions of water management and encourage regreening, educating people about the environment and its conservation. The Padyatra starts from Laporiya and subsequently breaks off into small clusters that interact with different villages.
The Padyatras are a highly effective, culture-specific means of community mobilization. Laxman Singh seeks, through the Padyatra, to re-establish the divinity in nature by promoting natural resources as manifestations of the divine spirit. Most importantly, padyatras are practical tools to bring back the ritual, color and celebration around water management that Rajasthan was once renowned for.
Local participation has organized itself around the tradition of volunteer community labor (shramdaan). Youth groups and the village councils have set up a fund to maintain the resources and assets they generate. Singh's association has set up centers in Nagar and Tonk to sustain networks of youth technicians more directly, and it organizes training programs every three months for groups of 25-30 youth. In these villages, the revival of local water management expertise has established bridges for other developmental efforts, such as nurseries of saplings and health care facilities.
Singh concentrates on many aspects of village development, including animal husbandry,
building up the ecosystem, water conservation and agriculture. The common thread running through all of Laxman Singh's endeavours is the desire to reach a stage of development where the village community has no need of any kind of outside assistance, financial or non-financial, and is totally self-reliant.
The real new understanding that has tweaked around his idea of water management is "the need to create systems that are sustained by nature, that do not require human intervention beyond a point," he said. "Government forest departments have attempted to develop forests in pasture lands by
ploughing contours, by investing in very expensive inputs and irrigation
systems. But after five years, in the same patch, forests have disappeared, contours have broken, and land has been encroached. Communities and governments have to understand and respect that nature
has her own ways of sustaining life.
"The development of the village has not taken place because people from
the outside came to help us," Singh said. "We did it through our own efforts – through cooperating with each other. . . . The people should feel that we are self-made in the sense that we have developed our village through our own efforts.
"And because of all this work that we and the people of the village, especially, have been doing, the village is a very strong village – which not only the government acknowledges, but other villages also acknowledge this fact – that Laporya is a strong village."
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