Listening to Waterman of Rajasthan and the Leftists of West Bengal: Narratives of Rainwater Harvesting.

Among all the components of environment water has now become the most important one for the local communities, policymakers, politicians, international funding agencies, multinational corporations, NGO activists, lawyers, governments and academicians. Never in the history of water the number of stakeholders are so numerous as of today who are equally vociferous and each one of them has constructed their own narrative on the management of nature's one of the most vital life support systems. In this paper a modest and preliminary attempt has been made to compare and contrast some contemporary narratives in the context of rainwater harvesting. Broadly, one narrative comes from the Alwar district of Rajasthan which has now become an international phenomenon particularly after the amazing grass root level works done by Rajendra Singh and his Tarun Bharat Sangh(TBS).The other narrative is derived from the texts which are recently being produced by the leftist intellectuals, activists and policymakers of West Bengal. The materials for these narratives on rainwater harvesting have been collected from various documentary sources like newspapers, journals, books and the author's own face to face interactions with the engineers and activists as well as fieldworks done in some villages of Paschim Medinipur district of West Bengal. The juxtaposition of these two kinds of narratives reveal the wide divergence between government action and grass root activism because these narratives are not only constructed by their authors in the form of written texts and/or oral deliberations but they also reflect the real material world managed and constructed by human beings backed by their ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]