Reclaiming Water Agency: A Medium Design to De-Weaponize Water

Water is interlinked, and because of this, many periurban areas, including Rampur, falls prey to the impacts of urban metabolism and wastewater. My creative research project looks at this puzzle and aims to enable periurban residents to reclaim and weave water through new landscape practices, design, material and spatial elements.

Through our field work, we understood that the state provides water sparsely for domestic and sanitation use. However, irrigation, a purpose of water essential for Rampur Residents’ livelihood, is not given the same priority. Additionally, since the priority of resource distribution lies with the ‘urban’, water has become a political weapon to control and encroach on rural boundaries. On the flip side, while the local farmers in Rampur can feel the impact of degrading water quality, they fail to realise that they contribute
to it through their farming practices.

Furthermore, waterlogging is a seasonal issue for the residents due to their location in the West Bengal Gangetic Delta, especially in the southern part of the district. This has caused many to migrate closer to the city for better homes and opportunities. Thus, as a resource that is so readily available, the irony
of water poverty lies not in its absence but in its excess.

The goal is to use existing practices and imagine how residents might create a more novel periurban water-culture for social, economic and ecological wellbeing for humans and non-humans. The first strategy cleans the canal water. It relies on the pre-existing water siphoning methods from the canal (a socially acceptable middle-ground for water access due to legal pluralism). The water channel is armed with a new two-way infrastructure created by farmers. This new infrastructure includes filtering methods such as sand and plant-based fi lters, and agricultural waste to provide cleaner water for farming. Due to the cropping cycle, the water inlet and discharge happen through the same armature by changing the slope of the channel, removing agricultural pollutants in the process.

Secondly, new farming practices are proposed to increase crop productivity and ecological sustainability. The farmlands are used for rice growing (during Aus and Boro) and fishing (during Aman). One of the practices is crab-rice co-cultivation, which is enabled through dykes and trenches. The crabs act as guardians of the rice fields, reducing the farmers’ reliance on chemical pesticides. They double as an additional source of income.

Finally, rainwater harvesting infrastructures are proposed. Instead of a traditional RWH, it is combined with a social space that builds on the existing pond-sharing behaviour in the locality and quality of farms as a community centre. It uses rain chains and terracotta pots as filters for rainwater purification. The overflow is channelled through the structure into the tanks, ponds, and farms.

In sum, this project mitigates the reliance of periurban areas on the state for water. It instead facilitates the residents of Rampur to use the existing landscape and terrain and sculpt it to reclaim water agency.