MOTIVATION

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”.  Empowerment and Sustainability is the key to any social issue today. A solution is not enough if it does not provide the means to sustain it. And the best way to achieve sustainability is to empower people at the center of the problem.

The reason our team chose the “Bhungroo” story lies in its strength of empowering the farmers (and rural women) on a simple and practical, alternate source of irrigation.  The successful implementation till date of 2506 Below Poverty Line families through 132 installations and the World Bank IDM 2007 award highlight the feasibility and promise of this concept.  

 “Bhungroo” Innovative Irrigation System THE CONCEPT

“Bhungroo” or ‘the straw’ is an Innovative Irrigation Concept of injecting the excess surface water below the soil and storing it in a subsoil aquifer (without any concrete civil work base).It works on the principle of difference of density of storm water and underground aquifer. This stored water can be retrieved and reused for winter & monsoon cropping.  

Perforated pipes (22-23 mts) are inserted in the land, where Bhungroo has to be installed. Once rainwater/storm water gets collected (i.e. the plot of the land gets water logged) this perforated pipe helps in injecting the collected monsoon water inside the farm land to a depth with subsoil water density higher than storm water density. The process enables the light weight rainwater to float above high density subsoil water such that it can be pumped out for irrigation as and when required by the farmer.

Bhungroo Ensures Sustainable Agro-Livelihood for vulnerable farmers of Salinity affected &/or Flash Flood prone areas with very scare and erratic rainfall (as low as 300 mm per annum).