Adventures in the Anthropocene. Gaia Vince
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service of his fellow Ladakhis. Engineering is a vocation for him in the same way that medicine might be to a doctor. Like Mahabir, his determination and effectiveness is transforming lives.
As soon as he qualified, Norphel returned to Leh to join his father’s cousin in the government of Ladakh’s rural development department as a civil engineer. It was an exciting time to be working, but also extremely challenging. There was hardly a road or bridge when he started in 1960, and everything had to be built by hand. ‘We had no funds even for pickaxes and shovels – people were using animal horns to dig in some places – but roads were the most urgent requirement,’ he says. ‘People had to travel everywhere by pony, and where the tracks were very poor, all the ponies would have to be unloaded so that the animals could cross the broken part, and then reloaded after. Journeys that took weeks can now be made in hours.’
Over the next thirty-five years, the enthusiastic, raven-haired engineer became a familiar sight in Ladakh’s villages. Unlike other government experts on secondment from elsewhere in India, Norphel became known for his genuine engagement in the villagers’ problems, and they grew to trust him. More than 90% of the population were subsistence farmers, living and working in tightly knit communities. There was no money around – everything was done through trade and cooperation – and when Norphel needed labour for his projects, people willingly came forward. ‘There is scarcely a village in Ladakh where I have not made a road, a culvert, a bridge, a school building, an irrigation system, or a zing [small water-storage tank fed by glacial meltwater],’ he says.
He approached each problem scientifically, experimenting by altering the variables until he arrived at a satisfactory solution – and always remembering that his designs had to be sustainable, using locally available materials. For example, he built a number of canals where instead of using an expensive cement lining that cracked during winter, he allowed weeds to grow and thicken, their roots naturally sealing the canal lining.
By the time of his retirement in 1995, priorities were shifting. Road-building was still important, but Ladakhis were becoming aware of a far more serious problem – one that threatened their livelihoods. ‘Every village I visited it would be the same thing: water scarcity. Glaciers were vanishing and streams were disappearing,’ Norphel says. ‘People would ask me to bring them water. Their irrigation systems were drying up and their harvests were failing. The government was starting to bring in grain rations.’ Norphel was determined to do something. ‘Water is the most precious commodity here. People are fighting each other for it: in the irrigation season, even brother and sister or father and son are fighting over water. It is against our tradition and our Buddhist teachings, but people are desperate. Peace depends on water.’
Inspiration came within a hundred metres of his house, one bitingly cold winter morning. ‘I saw water gushing from a pipe and was thinking what a shame it is that so much abundant water is wasted during wintertime – the taps are left open to stop the water freezing in the pipes and bursting them,’ he says. ‘Then I noticed that on its route to the stream, the water crossed a small wooded field, where it was collecting in pools. Where the trees provided shade, it was freezing into ice patches. By early March, the ice patches melted.’
Norphel realised that if he could somehow copy this on a much larger scale, he would have a way of storing up this winter water in an artificial glacier that would melt at just the right time for crop sowing and irrigation. It was a beautifully simple concept but achieving it would be fraught with difficulties. ‘People laughed when I first presented the idea and asked for funds,’ he says. ‘Officials and villagers were sceptical, “What crazy man are you? How can anyone make a glacier?” I was told.’ But Norphel soldiered on. He held meetings with village elders, and explained the concept. Gradually, his relentless enthusiasm caught on.
He had no equipment; no altimeter or GPS reader, not even a bulldozer. Perhaps just as challenging was the societal change that had occurred over the past decade. As water scarcity increased and the roads brought in trucks with government-subsidised grains, many villagers had left their fields to find work in the new tourist industry in Leh or elsewhere in India. The old trade and cooperation system was abandoned in favour of a new money-based economy. ‘The attitude completely changed: If I wanted any of the villagers to repair a canal or help build a new glacier, I had to pay them. No one does anything for free any more,’ Norphel says.
Norphel’s ingenious idea was to divert the winter ‘waste’ water from its course down the mountain, along regularly placed stone embankments that would slow it down and allow it to spread and trickle across a large surface depression a few hundred metres from the village. Here, the slowed water would freeze and pack into a glacier. He shows me the glacier site, pointing out the path he sends the water on until the rocky valley starts to take shape in my mind and I see how the glacier forms. Siting is everything. The glacial area is shaded by a mountain face during the winter months, when the sun is weak and low. By March, when the sun rises high enough, the thick ice sheet begins melting, pours into a water tanker and through a sluice gate to the farmers’ irrigation canals. The meltwater also helps recharge the groundwater aquifer. This water is so precious that during the irrigation season a man has to sleep by the sluice gate to guard against water theft.
The rocks beneath the ice sheet channel mountain breezes, cooling the sheet further. And Norphel points out second and third artificial glacier sites at successively higher elevations. ‘By the time this lowest one has melted, the middle one will start to melt,’ he says. ‘Then the highest one and, finally, the natural glacier at the top of the mountain.’ He is grinning now, and I can’t help joining him: it’s such a great invention.
He built his first artificial glacier with very little help, above the village of Phuktse. It was an immediate success, supplying an extra thirty days’ water to irrigation channels. ‘When people saw the benefits of the artificial glacier, they started helping me and we stretched the length of the glacier to two kilometres,’ Norphel says.
‘It was like a miracle, people quickly started to cultivate more land and started planting willow and poplar trees between their fields,’ says Phuktse farmer Skarma Dawa. ‘This technology is very good because it works and it is simple and there’s very little maintenance required.’ They are built using local labour and materials at a fraction of the cost of a cement water reservoir.
Norphel has built nine glaciers since. They average 250 metres long by a hundred metres wide, which he believes provide some 6 million gallons (23,000 cubic metres) of water each, although there has been no accurate analysis to date, and the undulating ground makes it difficult to guess the volume of ice in each glacier.
His work has earned him recognition from those he has helped – ‘I have a shelf-full of home-brewed beers and a trunk of khatag [ceremonial silk scarves given by Buddhists]’, he says – but there has been little interest from the scientific world. ‘I am trying to collect data on how and where the glacier forms best, and which parts precipitate first and why, so that I can improve on them and people can use the technique elsewhere. I lack scientific equipment. I have only my own observations.’
Norphel says he has already had some interest in his glaciers from NGOs working in Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. ‘In some areas, reservoirs are a much more practical solution.’ ‘But in terms of water storage and release at the irrigation season, you can’t beat artificial glaciers.’
Creating glaciers from scratch, while pretty awesome, is not entirely new. People may have been doing it as far back as the twelfth century. Legend has it that when Genghis Khan and his Mongol warriors set their sights on what is now northern Pakistan, the local villagers thwarted their advance by growing glaciers that blocked the mountain passes. The practice of ‘glacier grafting’ is known to go back centuries in Baltistan, an ethnic-Tibetan region of the Pakistani Karakoram mountains, where people rely entirely on glacier meltwater for irrigation. The technique, which has an important ceremonial component, involves dragging ice from a so-called ‘female’ glacier (a fast-moving, surging glacier), and from a ‘male’ glacier (a slow-moving, rock-strewn glacier) and planting them at a specific site – usually on a northern side of the mountain, above 4,500 metres. The ice is planted on top of boulders and interspersed with gourds, which burst and freeze, after which the ‘mated’