As we were driving through the scenic roads of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, mesmerized by the beauty, I said out loud, “how wonderful must it feel to live in a place such as this.” The local woman sitting nearby replied with half a smile, “surely it's breathtaking for those who come here for a few days, one can only understand the struggles when one starts living here.” And she was far from being wrong.
Life has always been challenging for the people living in this region due to its remoteness. On top of this, the ever growing impacts of climate change have been making the living situation harsher by the day. There has been a significant increase in erratic rainfall, heat waves, droughts, landslides, and flash floods in recent years. However, this is not a disheartening listing of all the challenges of living in the hill tract districts but rather an interesting story of a community that came together to adapt to this changing world and a project that helped them to achieve so.
For the past few summers, Juraichari -- a remote upazila of Rangamati that is only accessible by boats – has been experiencing intense heat waves and erratic rainfalls. The people here live simple lives, often growing crops and fruits to make a living. These prolonged droughts resulting from the extreme heat and lack of rainfall had been causing massive crop failures and thus, affecting the local economy and people's standard of living.
The areas where people depended on springs and other surface water bodies for daily consumption and domestic use had to start migrating to lower grounds as water bodies dried up every year. By some stroke of luck, in 2018, UNDP decided to implement a pilot project on locally-led adaptation in the upazila.
This project focused on developing the skills of the local communities in order to improve their livelihood and manage the watersheds. And the best part was that the communities could themselves choose the interventions they deem necessary with some assistance from experts.
Thus began the Climate Change Resilience Project (CCRP).
The first part of the process was the formation of the Climate Resilience Committee (CRC), for which UNDP with the help of karbari/village headmen held meetings with villagers from five selected paras/villages from each of the unions. During these meetings, two people from each of the paras were selected to represent them in the CRC. Thus, a committee of locals was formed who then elected a president, a general secretary, and a treasurer amongst themselves.
UnsplashThe District and Upazila Parishad Chairman were also included in the committee as advisors. Though people were free to form the committee however necessary, UNDP did assert a condition that the treasurer would have to be a female alongside other female members of the committee. This was done to ensure representation from both genders.
Following the formation of CRC, the members took feedback from their respective paras and after discussing with the UNDP staff, Zila Parishad staff, and other relevant experts, decided to install five solar power water pumps within their upazila. Given the massive water crisis and the limited budget, locals believed this was the best possible course of action and the committee was now fully responsible for implementing this. Hence, a committee bank account was created where they received the funding from UNDP in installments based on their progress.
As the work began, so did the challenges, while four of the boreholes were established in no time, each took about 15 days, and one was showing no sign of the water layer. The experts believed there was no hope for that locality since there was no alternate suitable location to install another borehole. The stubborn conductor, also a local fellow, was not ready to give up. He and his men kept boring till they found water on the 72nd day.
Another major challenge was the persistent Covid-19 lockdowns which made it impossible to get hold of and transport the building materials to this remote area. The prices of the materials skyrocketed as well. The locals had to use all their connections and influence in Rangamati Sadar to acquire the materials and everyone stepped in to help in any way they could.
As this intervention was operating on a limited budget and the inflation posed another challenge, the local collectors decided to not demand any contributions from UNDP. As a gesture, the vulnerable community provided free labour to set up the solar pumps.
When the water dried up, local communities residing at the paras teamed up and helped to manually carry all the building material 15km in the intense heat. And this is how the local community of Juraichari set up the five solar power water pumps by united effort and determination.
You can hear it in their voices when the locals tell you the story, that all their hard work has paid off, as they now have four solar pumps irrigating an area of 45 hectares. Land that used to be barren is now growing two to three crops a year. The fifth solar pump is providing drinking water for 154 out of 180 families in one of the areas.
The most fascinating part is perhaps that the CRC committee still exists even after the project has ended. To continue the operations of the pumps, the villagers now pay Tk50 every month in the committee fund for repair and maintenance. And the people of Juraishari intend to keep it that way for maintaining good governance -- thus fulfilling the CCRP's hope of instilling ownership of the project interventions amongst the local communities.
Mahzabeen Mahfuz is working in ICCCAD as a Research Officer, her research interest lies in Climate Change Adaptation. She can be reached at [email protected].
