Humans have innovated and evolved many locally-adaptive technologies
in remote and distant cultural geographic regions responding to local needs. Through the lens of today’s engineering skills and technological boom, these may look trivial yet they have been very useful innovations and often sustainable solutions to local and geography-specific anthropogenic problems. It has been observed that they are self-sustaining, small-scale, and low-cost but independent of external energy input to run them effectively. In the difficult terrains of montane ecosystems with recurrent environmental hazards, poor communication, and transportation, some of them are so successful that the technology permeated and diffused to relatively vast geography and still epitomizes yet another facet of traditional ecological knowledge. The traditional watermills or Gharats, still dependent on an ancient-design impulse-type turbine, display such an innovative technology widely found in various montane districts of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. So, it is not surprising that a huge number of Gharats (around 2, 00,000) have been functional in the Indian Himalayan region. Since water is an abundant natural resource and is available throughout the year in the Himalayan region, it is employed for driving Gharat and used in the processing of food grains in remote villages throughout the Himalayas.
Gharat owes its name to the characteristic ‘Gharr – Gharr – Gharr’ sound 
made by rotating wheels while mostly used for the production of milling flour, processing lumber, or textile. These wheels of Gharats operate through the kinetic energy derived from gushing water flowing downhill from glaciers, perennial streams, and narrow river channels. Quite often, water from a stream is diverted to a Gharat through a channel and the outflow is made to irrigate a small patch of vegetables or other crops before joining the stream again. As agriculture is the mainstay of a large section of demography and there is no dearth of water, these local technological interventions keep playing a key role in irrigating agricultural crops and sustaining the livelihood of the hill communities.
Unfortunately, development through the building of medium to large hydropower dams with their tunnels, flow diversions, and repeated blasting has abolished many fragile ecosystems. It also sealed the fate of hundreds and thousands of Gharats in Himachal and Uttarakhand. Large developmental projects, as it happens around the world, tend to ignore small-scale, low-cost, and locally-adaptive technology and innovations. In this process of destruction, they also bulldoze the bio-cultural heritage of the land. In making Gharats, almost all of the building materials were sourced from the surroundings, the masons endowed with artisanal skills were involved, and they all came together to respond and resolve a local need and they progressed successfully on that line.
Gharats have once ground wheat, rice, maize, or even extracted oil since the 7th century, but they are now gradually dying, thanks to electricity-run mills replacing these environment-freindly systems in many places. Will the residents of Himalayan states stop hearing the enigmatic yet nostalgic sounds of Gharat that have enveloped their senses from their childhood? Or can they forget the tasty meals prepared from Gharat-flour? …….
Photo: Avik Ray
Collector:Avik Ray
