I had posted a version of this on March 20th, promising to journal my first-hand experience with the issues I love to write about. Well, time and a lack of high speed internet access prevented me from doing so in real time, and the realities of being a second semester senior caused me to need to put off writing about my experience in-depth until now. Don’t fret though, I drafted out each of the posts I will be putting up daily for the next two weeks (in addition to my usual commentary) two months ago. They will be going into a special category on the blog, so you can look for them there.

If you have not gotten a chance to read what is below, I suggest you take a look. Re-read it if you’d like as well. It’s largely left unchanged to reflect my feelings at the time before I left, but I did go back and make a few edits…

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In just a few short hours, I will embark on my journey to the historic Land of Kings, Rajasthan. As my trip is extremely relevant to the purpose of this blog, I hope to use the opportunity as a forum to give first hand accounts of what I am seeing and hearing and then start a discussion based on your reactions to my observations. While I don’t know what the situation will be in terms of internet access, I will write a short update as often as I possibly can.

So I’d guess that you’re probably wondering how I was able become involved in such an endeavor. Well, it’s no secret that I care very deeply about international development and also global environmental issues. Despite this interest, I’ve never had an opportunity to see with my own eyes what the situation looks like on the ground. Certainly as a Westerner raised in a middle-class family (middle-call by our standards, at least), I am privileged and I am quite cognizant of this. Yet I’m not sure if I can ever fully grasp what life is like on a dollar a day, a phrase that many media sources and academics just toss out there, without experiencing it for myself. So when I heard that my college, Grinnell, was taking three students to Rajasthan, India, I jumped at the opportunity and was lucky enough to be selected to go.

The purpose of the trip is for myself and my two peers from Grinnell, as well as seven students from Northwestern University, our partner in this project, to design independent research projects, gather information while in Rajasthan, and analyze our results upon returning to the states. As a second component, we are working with the highly regarded Jal Bhagirathi Foundation, an NGO that deals with water scarcity issues in the region. The first few days will be devoted to working with the Foundation’s scholars and hearing their perspective on the problem.

Much of the Indian state of Rajasthan is located in the Thar Desert. In fact, it is the most populous desert region in the world and not coincidentally the second poorest state in all of India. In such a water rich nation as the United States, we really have no idea of the extent of the water crisis gripping much of the world. Farmers in Rajasthan have rioted because they lack the necessary water to irrigate their crops. Further, the quality is extremely low, as the water they do have is often brackish, saline and has unsafe concentrations of substances such as fluorine that make it unsafe to drink. The state and federal governments in India have been at a loss in finding a solution, despite the fact that up until fairly recently, these people lived on this same land sustainably and successfully for over a millennium. Research suggests a large part of the reason these people might be so poor and undeveloped compared to surrounding states is their lack of access to resources such as water. In the coming years, climate disruption due to increased carbon in the atmosphere will only make the situation worse. Droughts will become more frequent as the monsoons continually fail. Aside from Africa, South Asia will be hit harder by climate change than any other place in the world (although things look pretty bad in Australia too).

So my task, and that of the other students, is to come up with a solution to this problem. It’s pretty hard to believe that this is what they actually expect of us. Finding even a partial solution might prove elusive. Knowing comparatively little about the region and the problem, it’s pretty arrogant to expect us Westerners to come in and make a positive difference. I view the purpose of my trip as a chance to listen. My project deals with determining the effectiveness of NGOs focus on water education or teaching self-help principles. A great deal of my research will be based on interviews and quantitative metrics I record while talking to people living in rural desert villages (with the help of a translator) and also through the NGOs themselves. The general idea is that I will analyze the two and find out whether what these organizations are doing meets the needs of the people. I will explain this in further detail as time goes on. As Rajasthan was heavily influenced by British colonization, the second part of my study will be looking at what I can draw from interactions with Native Americans, Westerners and similar NGOs in the American Southwest and also in Australia with the Aborigines. With some luck, I will come up with an epiphany that might provide useful insights based on the information I gathered and as a relatively unbiased outsider.

This should be exciting. I am also stopping in Delhi twice (on the front and back end), which will be just another view of the great country of India and I hope to write about that as well. Please do offer feedback along the way. I’d really like to hear your perspective.

~Jordan