Construction of Traditional Stepped Wells in Rajasthan (India)- Learning from the Past to Conserve for the Future

Many countries are facing a drinking water crisis today, and many governments and NGOs are deriving new sustainable water supplies, ensuring quantity and quality. Aiding this, water infrastructure experts are also exploring the revival of traditional water systems and methods to address scarcity, especially to support societal traditions and cultural resilience. While protection of catchments and sources, recharging water tables and strengthening the role of communities-ensuring access and managing water are emphasised in the current conservation and revival strategies, a water system's most prominent and tangible component, i.e. access and protection structure itself, requires in-depth study to address present restoration challenges. A lack of understanding of the structure and construction of traditional water storage bodies as a product of multi-layered knowledge of topography, geology, hydrology, soil types, local contexts, etc., coupled with the linear and standardised approach, is yielding undesirable and unsustainable results such as inappropriate restoration of the structure, thus compromising structural and material integrity and heritage value. Hence it becomes critical to address this problem with a multidisciplinary technical understanding of excavation, structural and construction systems that have been used to build these architectural marvels, perhaps beyond the craft skills and knowledge available today. The paper explores how the historic step wells were technically and skilfully designed and constructed, the structural and geotechnical considerations/constraints, response to local hydrology, transformed modes of water extraction and how reuse can serve modern local functional needs while preserving and celebrating the historic character and cultural heritage values.