Mawsynram
See also Rainfall: India, especially for the Records.
Mawsynram receives an average annual rainfall of 11,872 mm (almost 39 feet!).
There are rope bridges all along the Himalayas, from Kishtwar (Jammu), Gilgit-Baltistan and Ladakh in the west to Arunachal in the East. However, bridges made of living roots are, perhaps, unique to Meghalaya.
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Mawsynram
Mawsynram (East Khasi Hills district) is 56 kilometres from Shillong, Meghalaya.
Mobshare.in hints that Cherrapunjee has been recorded as the wettest place in the world because there was no meteorological department office in Mawsynram.
A life spent in Mawsynram, the wettest place on earth
AFP | Jul 29, 2013
MAWSYNRAM: Deep in northeast, villagers use grass to sound-proof their huts from deafening rain, clouds are a familiar sight inside homes and a suitably rusted sign tells visitors they are in the " wettest place on earth".
Guinness record: wettest place on earth
Oddly enough, lifelong residents of Mawsynram, a small cluster of hamlets in Meghalaya state have little idea that their scenic home holds a Guinness record for the highest average annual rainfall of 11,873 millimeters (467 inches).
"The rain used to frighten me when I was a young girl, it used to make our lives hell. Today people have it easy," Bini Kynter (who must be "nearly 100 years old") says, wrapping a green tartan shawl tightly around her shoulders.
Unique location
Meteorologists say Mawsynram's location, close to Bangladesh and the Bay of Bengal is the reason the tiny cluster receives so much rain.
"What happens is that whenever any moisture gathers over the Bay of Bengal, it causes precipitation over Mawsynram, leading to a heavy, long monsoon season," Sunit Das of the meteorological department said.
While annual monsoon rain lashed the national capital last week, causing traffic chaos and flooding at the international airport, such problems are mild for Mawsynram.
Development
Just thirty years ago, Mawsynram had no paved roads, no running water and no electricity, making its six-month long monsoon an insufferable experience for its mostly impoverished residents.
Landslides still occur regularly, blocking the only paved road connecting the hillside hamlets. Rainwater still seeps into the mud huts occupied by some villagers. And, while most homes now have electricity, outages are commonplace.
Preparing for the monsoon
Every winter the people of Mawsynram spend months preparing for the wet season ahead, anticipating nonstop rain and no sunshine for several days at a time.
They repair their battered roofs. They cut and hoard firewood, a source of light and fuel for cooking. They buy and store foodgrains, since few will venture out to shop during the wettest months between May and July.
The women make rain covers known as "knups," using bamboo slivers, plastic sheets and broom grass to create a rain shield that resembles a turtle shell, meant to be worn on one's head while being large enough to keep rain off one's knees.
The labour-intensive process of weaving a knup, each one takes at least an hour to complete, occupies the women of the village right through the rainy season, when they are cooped up indoors for months at a time.
Vegetation
Bamboo and broom grass, a delicate, fragrant, olive-coloured grass used to make Indian brooms, are among the chief plants grown in this rocky, hilly region.
Broom grass is dipped in water, flattened using wooden blocks and finally dried on rooftops across Mawsynram. According to Prelian Pdah, a grandmother of nine, this makes the grass stronger and more likely to survive a downpour.
Pdah, 70, spends part of the winter and all of the monsoon season making bamboo baskets, brooms and knups which are bought by visiting businessmen who sell them around the state.
"I don't like the heavy rainfall, it's boring to stay indoors all day. It's annoying," she said.
Cherrapunji [Sohra]: The traditional holder of the record
Although few Mawsynram residents seemed to know or care about their record-holder status, the right to the Guinness title has been hotly disputed by a nearby town, Cherrapunji [Sohra], which used to lay claim to that honour.
Reaction to the rains
In sleepy Mawsynram, many find the record-setting monsoon downright depressing.
"There's no sun, so if you don't have electricity it's very dark indoors, even during the day," Moonstar Marbaniang, the pyjama-clad headman of Mawsynram says.
Those who have second homes elsewhere flee to escape the season. Others catch up on their sleep, according to Marbaniang, whose first name suggests one of the more striking legacies of colonial rule in India's northeast.
Somewhat fittingly for a state whose name means "the abode of the clouds" in the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit, it is not unusual for clouds to drift through people's homes in Mawsynram, leaving a wet film on their furniture.
The grass-covered roofs are meant to muffle the relentless drumming of the rain, but a heavy downpour will usually dislodge the grass to deafening effect.
"We have to talk a little louder to be heard during the monsoon!" 67-year-old Marbaniang said, his mischievous eyes sparkling.
When the monsoon finally ends, there are no parties to mark its exit. The rainy season simply gives way to the repair season, Marbaniang says.
"We don't hold any celebration or festival to mark the end of the rain. We just start drying our clothes outside," he says, flashing a toothless grin.
Despite enduring record amounts of rain, sanguine villagers say there is no other place they would rather live.
Marbaniang, whose children all live in Shillong, says: "I'll never leave, this is my home, I was born here, I will die here."
"Sure, it rains a lot, but we are used to it. We just wait it out."
English names
Historians say the past presence of British soldiers and missionaries in this region has seen many people name their children after random English words or famous historical figures, often with no knowledge of what they might mean.
State capital Shillong's former nickname as the "Scotland of the East" also goes some way to explain the popularity of tartan scarves and shawls, even in the most far-flung and underdeveloped villages of Meghalaya.
Mawjymbuin Cave
Meghalaya Tourism informs us: This cave, due to years of weathering and due to dripping of mineralized solutions and deposition of calcium carbonate, it has thus given rise to some magnificent stalagmites. These stalagmites are not only important and of great interest for geological research but also because of their exquisiteness. The stalagmite of the Mawjymbuin Cave is shaped into a massive Shivalinga. The cave also has a dome shaped rock with a flat top called the Symper Rock.
Drinking water
2023: a shortage
Kangkan Kalita1, February 21, 2023: The Times of India
Guwahati : Clouds float into their homes like everyday guests and the rain, when it pours, can be unceasing. But voters in arguably the world's wettest belt, Cherrapunji-Mawsynram in pollbound Meghalaya, are left demanding from their elected representatives the one thing you would expect them to be never short of: drinking water.
In peak monsoon, it can rain more than 1,000mm in a day in Mawsynram and Cherrapunji, as it did on June 17 last year to set a new 24-hour record of 1003. 6mm. Ask Larisa Myrthong to explain the conundrum of unrelenting rain and unreasonable water shortage and she has a response as dry as the water tap she points to.
“Water supply lasts only for an hour or so each day. The truth is none of the political parties has yet treated our water woes with the seriousness the issue deserves,” she said.
The scientific explanation for the rain-abundant region running short of drinking water is “low recharge of groundwater” because of a growing population and shrinking forest cover.
Rainwater harvesting is still in its infancy, forcing residents to pay private players and community organisations to source water from streams managed by the elected traditional local bodies called dorbars.
“Our water often comes from areas that are under other dorbars, and hence it isn't free,” said Shembhalang Kharwanlang, headman of Dorbar Khliehshnong in Sohra constituency.
Kharwanlang, who also heads the environmental studies department in Sohra College, said there was no solution in sight other than water preservation measures. Larisa, an employee of the local dorbar, said residents like her had been paying Rs 300 to Rs 400 for a tanker of water containing around 1,500 litres.
In Mawsynram, many families traverse the hilly tracts for more than an hour to reach the streams and fetch enough water to get by. “Those of us who run businesses suffer the most,” said Bisharlang Kharnaior, who manages a guesthouse.
Extremes of water and lack of it
The Times of India, Jun 19 2016
Mithila Phadke in Mawsynram
Residents of Mawsynram, a village in Meghalaya which gets a record-breaking 11,861 mm of rain a year, are used to clouds floating right into their homes. But once the monsoon is over, they have to queue up at taps and fight for water It was the kind of rain you wouldn't see anywhere else. We could barely see four feet ahead of us. We could touch the clouds, smell the clouds, taste the clouds.“
We're sitting in a government building in the heart of Shillong but Social Welfare director HM Shangpliang's thoughts are elsewhere.Sixty-five kilometres away, to be precise, in the tiny rain-swept village of Mawsynram, where he grew up. It's a place where residents use grass to soften the sound of the deafening rain on their roofs, dry their drenched clothes on chulhas as often as thrice a day , and won't bat an eye when a mass of clouds floats right into their homes.
They follow us too, those clouds, as we drive up the winding, pot-holed road to Mawsynram on a rainy afternoon. Nestled in Meghalaya's East Khasi Hills, the cluster of about 1,000 homes is the custodian of a rather grand title. It holds the Guinness Record for “the wettest place on earth“, having nudged long-time champion Cherrapunji from the podium. Around June, when most of India begins to look forward to the first weak drizzles, Mawsynram locals are already well into their monsoon. The average annual rainfall is 467 inches (11,861mm), according to the Guinness website. And this year, the rains began even earlier in April.
As we move closer to Mawsynram, the gentler, intermittent showers that this Mumbai-based reporter had begun getting used to since arriving in Shillong, soon give way to an insistent, noisy downpour. It makes car chatter difficult, drops visibility to around five feet and gets the driver grumbling about how the government “needs to fix these damn roads already“.
In Mawsynram, however, this is a “good weather“ day . Less than an hour later, when we arrive at the village's fringe, the rain has paused. It's bazaar day, and vendors from Shillong and the surrounding region are fast setting up their stalls. “Slap khyndai sngi. It means the `nine-day rain' in Khasi,“ says the appropriately named Barisha, as she restocks the shelves at her kirana store. She's seen 67 monsoons, and her grandson, who's translating, says she is very tired of them. Mawsynram experienced the slap khyndai sngi recently . Terms for sevenday and 12-day rain too find their way into casual conversation on a regular basis. “Everything is damp inside the house, all the time. And so noisy . My head hurts,“ Barisha adds, grabbing her forehead for effect, and summarily shooing us out so she can get back to her work.
For the kids of Mawsynram, though, the monsoons mean two kinds of holidays. “There are times when it has been raining a great deal for a week or more at a stretch so we decide to give the students a couple of days off,“ says former village-headman and now grammar teacher RW Rapsang, who teaches at the Mawsynram HSC School. “And then, there are times when the rain stops for a bit, and we want the kids to enjoy the good weather. So, too much rain -holiday . No rain -also holiday!“ Classes are cancelled on days when the sound of deafening rain on the tin roof makes it impossible to hear the teacher. “So you can say this is quite a happy place for students!“ Rapsang adds, laughing.
Rapsang, who's in his fifties, grew up in Mawsynram. Over rice cakes and chai, he talks about growing up in a home where the kids went about barefoot in the rains because plastic slippers were too expensive to afford. “We say here that when the leaves start turning inside out, the monsoons are over.“
He is referring to the time when the kyrtih or wind begins blowing from east to west, and makes the leaves blow in the opposite direction. “Our elders would ask us to observe if we could see the white inside of the leaves. Once we could, we knew dry weather was on its way .“
A rare spell of good weather sends local optimism off the charts.An open-air congregation planned by a local church had to be moved inside a building when the downpour knocked the pandal down.“They rebuilt it, and that same night, it was destroyed again,“ says assistant headmaster PW Shangpliang, tutting. “What they were thinking, I don't know. The rain hits the ground almost horizontally here.That and the winds lash out at houses from the sides.“
Houses used to be built “more sensibly“ here, he says. The architecture involved rocks weighing down the roof, resting at the sides of the limestone structure. Today , most homes are made of concrete, with tin roofs. A couple have the `knup', the turtle shell-shaped rain shield of bamboo and grass, propped up outside. They're mostly used by farmers who work in the fields around Mawsynram.
Aside from potatoes and turnips that a handful of the residents cultivate for their kitchens, produce is sourced from outside. The soil in the limestone plateau doesn't absorb water. “There is barely any forest cover, so a lot of erosion of top soil happens. All of it flows down into Bangladesh next door,“ says village headman Moonstar Marbaniang, laughing. The irony is that like its neighbour Cherrapunji (or `Sohra' as locals call it), the “wettest place on earth“ grapples with an acute water shortage after monsoon ends around October. The few reservoirs in the area run dry in winter and residents get water supply for just two hours in the morning, and two in the evening. Former headman Rapsang recalls how most of his earlier work load involved placating residents engaged in battles at the water-taps.“We very much need an initiative that solves our water crisis. Mawsynram is the wettest desert,“ he says. “Sohra next door has faced a similar problem.“
Because it is better-known and hence, gets more tourism, Cherrapunji's water crisis is less acute today. The Sohra Eco-Restoration Project was launched in 2010, with the support of the Planning Commission. Trees were planted, locals got involved in the campaign and gradually , Cherrapunji's forest cover has increased considerably . “Our plan is to gradually expand the project to Mawsynram and other places in the Khasi Hills,“ says Barkos Warjri, who is among those spearheading the initiative.
While resident Betty Mardaniang, 33, hopes her hometown's water woes get resolved soon, she is unsure if she wants to wait around until that happens. “Do you know how long it rained last week?“ she mutters, as we traipse around the village, making the most of a dry afternoon. “My god, I can still hear the noise in my head. I want to move to Shillong as soon as I can. What's the Mumbai rain like?“ She listens, unimpressed, to this reporter's descriptions of floods and overflowing drains.“Hmm, that is bad. No, our rains definitely don't have any of that.“
