Spotlight - 11.2019

(Nancy Kaufman) #1

6 IN THE SPOTLIGHT


Fotos: Bartosz Hadyniak, Serg_Velusceac, Serhii Brovko/iStock.com; Kate Nash/facebook; Whitley Fund for Nature; Catrin Arwel Photography

Spotlight 11/

Women carrying water
at the Panna Meena
Ka Kund stepwell

INDIA

Wells of wisdom
ADVANCED

To us, India’s stepwells recall nothing so much
as the bizarre stairways of M. C. Escher. For
locals, though, the largely forgotten wells, the
oldest of which date back 2,000 years, have clear
environmental significance. As The Economist re-
ports, organizations such as the Aga Khan Trust
for Culture (AKTC) are discovering why and
having them renovated.
The main reason for building them was prac-
tical: in a region where most of the rain falls dur-
ing a few monsoon months, a stepwell makes
access to water easy, whether levels rise or fall.
India has thousands of stepwells, and most of
them are in poor repair. Among the best known

are Panna Meena Ka Kund and Chand Baori in
Rajasthan, northern India. The latter, originally
built in the eighth century and expanded in the
18th, has 3,500 steps and reaches 30 metres into
the ground.
India’s British rulers saw the wells as unclean
and had many of them filled in. Renovations,
however, have demonstrated the wells’ very
genius: at a site in Delhi, the AKTC recently
opened a filled-in well that was designed to
feed an aquifer. It quickly helped to raise the
water table in the area by several metres — a
small bit of good news in the middle of India’s
current water crisis.

aquifier [(ÄkwIfE]
, wasserführende Schicht
latter [(lÄtE]
, der, die, das Letztere

recall sth. [ri(kO:l]
, an etw. erinnern
stairway [(steEweI]
, hier: Treppenillusion

stepwell [(stepwel]
, Stufenbrunnen
water table [(wO:tE )teIb&l]
, Grundwasserspiegel

well [wel]
, Brunnen

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