With wisdom and wit, Anupam Mishra talks about the amazing feats of engineering built centuries ago by the people of India’s Golden Desert to harvest water. These structures are still used today — and are often superior to modern water megaprojects.(Recorded at TEDIndia, November 2009, Mysore, India. Duration: 17:14) Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/216V Watch Anupam Mishra’s […]Continue reading
Why you should listen
Anupam Mishra travels across water-challenged India studying rainwater harvesting methods and learning from the people behind them. He presents his findings to NGOs, development agencies and environmental groups, pulling from centuries of indigenous wisdom that has found water for drinking and irrigation even in extremely arid landscapes through wells, filter ponds and other catchment systems.
A founding member of the Gandhi Peace Foundation, Mishra is working to bridge the gap between modern water management technology and india's heritage of water harvesting, so that every community is self-sustainable and efficiently safekeeping an increasingly scarce and precious resource.
What others say
“In [him] lives a spirit, of quiet service, that once existed freely in our politics and our activism, a spirit that has been completely excised from one sphere and remains gravely threatened in the other.” — Ramachandra Guha, in The Hindu