Page 87 - EarthHeroes

400 kilometres away across the rugged mountain passes, so that he could finish his schooling. While there, he cooked and cleaned for the teachers to pay for his food and a place to stay. He went on to study engineering at university.
On completing his studies, Chewang returned to Leh and immediately got a
job working for his father’s cousin as a rural civil engineer. He worked on many government projects and, as water shortages began to take effect, he was asked to look into building concrete dams to store water. But Chewang realised that dams could be very damaging to the environment and were also expensive to build. He felt sure there must be a better solution to the problem and began to experiment with different ideas. Then one winter morning he had a bright idea . . .
There was a village water tap near his house that was left running throughout winter to stop the pipes freezing. Chewang noticed that, as water ran to join the stream, some froze in pools in the shade of a tree. The ice pools grew bigger by the day, but meanwhile, the stream flowed freely without freezing over.
In spring, the pools of ice gradually melted away. Chewang wondered if there was a way to slow down the mountain streams to create shallow pools where water
could be frozen and stored in the winter and then melted in spring. What if he could make artificial glaciers?
Chewang was excited by this idea and began to sketch some designs. Streams would be gently slowed by a series of walls until the water froze, little by little,
as an artificial glacier. Wide streams would form frozen waterfalls as they made their way down the mountainside, while narrow streams on steeper slopes would first be diverted along a channel to a gentler incline. He would try to build his glaciers in the shade of the mountain, and always make sure they were as close as possible to the village so the ice would melt early enough in spring to irrigate the precious crops.
When Chewang showed his idea to villagers and officials to ask for funding, they called him pagal, or crazy. The idea of artificial glaciers was just too strange
for them to understand. But in 1987, undeterred, and with only a few people to
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