Ice stupa
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Ambika Pandit, October 4, 2020: The Times of India
From: Ambika Pandit, October 4, 2020: The Times of India
In the winter of 2019, Acho Tashi, 42, joined other men from his village of Kulum to make an ‘ice stupa’, a simple yet unique Ladakhi innovation that uses pipes and gravity to bring water to an arid landscape. In the summer of 2020, as the stupa started melting, water flowed once again into the channels that had dried up and forced many villagers to leave. The Kulumpas could once again water their farmlands.
Located 50km southeast of Leh, Kulum started feeling the effect of climate change around 2012 when the water stream they survived on dried up due to glacial reduction. Most of the residents, comprising 11 agrarian families with an average of six members each, were forced to move out of the village in search of work. They ended up as daily wagers or set up small utility shops like tea stalls in the nearby town of Upshi while their large habitable homes lay vacant with a handful of elderly people staying back. With the ice stupa concept working, the families are hopeful about returning home.
Kulum isn’t the only village that has suffered; there are nearly six other villages that have experienced something similar. And there are about 16 to 18 villages that might have to be abandoned in the future with water channels drying up.
Keeping all this in mind, in 2019, the Union ministry of tribal affairs decided to financially support a two-year research project to expand on existing work on ice stupas by Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL) and Himalayan Institute of Alternatives Ladakh (HIAL).
Under the pilot project, a 45-foot ice stupa that could store three lakh litres of water was built at Kulum. Twenty-five other villages also built such ice stupas between November 2019 and February 2020. Together, these were able to conserve over 60 million litres of water for agriculture and plantation, government data shows. Though mostly built by villagers in the age-group of 18 to 30 years, even children and the elderly chipped in to make the stupas.
With it registering success, Tashi and others are hoping to make a bigger stupa this winter. He is also hopeful that his two children aged eight and 10 will get to grow up in Kulum just like him, along a meltwater stream for glaciers. The government has bigger plans — it not only wants to rebuild the stupas at all these 26 villages but also expand the project to include 24 more villages.
There are 242 inhabited villages in Leh and nearly all face water shortage in some measure. Ladakh, after all, is a cold desert, and the villages are located at various oases. These mostly grow vegetables and some crops like barley and store a part of their produce to survive the severe winter.
HIAL CEO and Dean Gitanjali stresses that three major issues — water scarcity, low indoor temperatures in buildings, and a shift from the original agrarian-based economy — are causing migration of the youth. So, the project seeks to rehabilitate abandoned villages through ice stupas, promotion of farm-stay tourism across villages, and passive solar heating systems to enable people to survive the harsh winter without using polluting and expensive fuels like diesel and petrol for heating.
On completion of this project, other government schemes will be used to build on water management strategies to create a holistic village rehabilitation, say MoTA officials.
SECMOL founder, innovator and education reformist, Sonam Wangchuk, has been steering the work on ice stupas with the first prototype built at a SECMOL school in 2013. The project was scaled up through a competition in 2018 and residents of 15 villages built the stupas, with Shara village building the biggest one at 120 feet. The ice stupas that store large quantities of water as frozen ice generally have a height ranging from 30 to 50 metres.
Meanwhile, HIAL will offer a threemonth certificate course on stupa making from November 15.
See also
Ice stupa
