Apo Vai Amrtam
A documentary on traditional water harvesting across arid India, made for the Ministry of Education's IKS Division and screened at the G20 Summit.
The Film
A documentary made for the Indian Knowledge Systems Division under the Ministry of Education, produced under Prachyam for a G20 delegation meeting in western India. It documents traditional water harvesting and conservation techniques across arid regions of the country.
The Subject
Apo Vai Amrtam — the waters are indeed nectar — is a Vedic phrase, and the
film's subject is the range of engineering that phrase produced across India's
driest regions, largely without the modern infrastructure that arid-zone water
management now depends on.
Rajasthan's stepwells, the baoris and baolis built from around the 9th century
onward, reached down to the water table across multiple storeys of carved
galleries, staying cool and usable through the dry months. Gujarat's vav
architecture, most famously the Rani ki Vav at Patan, combined the same
function with elaborate sculptural programmes. Tamil Nadu's eri system
networked thousands of irrigation tanks so that the overflow of one fed the
next, an interlinked cascade engineered to hold monsoon water across an entire
watershed rather than a single village.
These systems were not preserved as monuments; in most cases they were simply
still in use, maintained by local knowledge that had never been formally
documented. The film's brief — placing that knowledge in front of a G20
delegation — treated it as a body of applicable engineering rather than as
heritage on display.
How I Made It
I led creative direction across research, scripting and field work, which ran across Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Delhi. Filming took place at heritage sites and historic stepwells, and with indigenous Bhil communities who continue generational water conservation methods. Prof. Michel Danino and Prof. Ramnath Jha appear as academic voices, with Praveen Chaturvedi as narrator and on-screen anchor.
Where It Landed
The documentary was screened at the G20 Summit, positioning India's ancestral knowledge as applicable to contemporary water management and climate resilience.
