Marriage of Fools

I almost stepped on a rake again the other day, driven by the urge to jump into a field that is, in theory, indispensable, yet in practice sits squarely in the paradox of "high need with zero demand".

The subject: Low-energy water pumping.

I have spent years obsessing over designs that use a river’s kinetic energy to pump water into fields - pontoon-mounted Darrieus or Gorlov turbines driving pumps, to more esoteric ideas like the Hydrautomat water staircase.

The wake-up jolt came when my own shadow asked : fine, you build a working prototype, then what? Who, exactly, will use it or buy it?
A sobering question. Experience and data both show that most community-scale alternative energy or WASH projects collapse the moment they are no longer underwritten or subsidized by governments or NGOs.

While riding through the upper reaches of Arunachal Pradesh, I was initially awed, and eventually irritated, by the number of water-driven prayer wheels lining the roadsides. At first, I stopped at every one to photograph them. After a few dozen, I began to wonder why micro-hydel units were not integrated into the same flows, especially in a region plagued by chronic power cuts. Turning the wheels of Dharma is fine; electrified Dharma would be better. Likewise, why not install ram pumps to lift water to nearby villages and homes?

When I raised these questions with village elders, officials and lawmakers, the response was universal: but who will install and run them?
Ram pumps? Duh ! (things may differ these days, though, as long as I pronounce them as Ra'am Pumps).

And why single out Arunachal Pradesh? The situation is identical across hill states in India and far beyond. The unspoken assumption is always the same: someone else will arrive, install the equipment, maintain it, train a local operator, and pay him a salary. The community enjoys the benefits until the donor withdraws and hands over operations. Then the system falters.

This pattern repeats everywhere - biomass gasifier gensets for off-grid electrification in India, micro-hydel projects across the Himalayas, solar-lantern schemes in Africa, fog-catching nets for drinking water in Peru. First, people will stop, (if they ever start) paying their subscriptions. Next, maintenance workers disappear after not being paid. Then local politics takes over. Plus, nobody wants to collect biomass, clean the nets, pay for routine maintenance, or chip in for spare parts.

In Chile, after years of harvesting drinking water from fog catcher nets, the community of leaders of El Tofo actively discouraged maintenance once Canadian donors, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) left, hoping to pressure the government into laying water pipelines from a nearby river instead.

Appropriate Technology use for uplifting remote and deprived communities makes perfect sense to starry-eyed NGO volunteers and misguided tinkerers like myself. Ironically, the people who stand to benefit the most are often the ones who resist it the hardest.

Community ownership, too, is a myth - one disproven hundreds, if not thousands, of times across the world.

So combining both, Appropriate Technology and Community ownership, in most cases is nothing but a marriage of fools.

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