Spotlight - 11.2019

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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