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other hand, during the rest of the year there isn't enough 

 water. They haven't got enough water for irrigation to grow 

 crops . 



They have tried to solve this problem by building dams 

 so they can store the water, what they call over-season 

 storage, to hold it for the winter season. But the geology 

 of the country is such that there aren't many good dam 

 sites. It's quite a young geology. 



The mountains are steep, and easily eroded, quite 

 unlike the United States where there are many huge 

 reservoirs like Lake Mead back of Hoover Dam, and Lake 

 Powell back of the Glen Canyon Dam, and others on the 

 Colorado, the reservoirs back of the dams in the Sierra 

 Nevada, the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia, and the other 

 dams in the northwest United States where you can store 

 enormous quantities of water. 



Those sites don't exist in India. The reason is that 

 the valleys are too steep, so you build a high dam and you 

 just get a little bit of water back of it. You can see how 

 that would be. It costs several times as much per acre foot 

 of water to store water in India as it does in the United 

 States, maybe five or ten times as much. 



On the other hand, the Ganges Plain is a great sponge. 

 It's a huge pile of alluvial sediments, maybe 20- to 30,000 

 feet thick, a down-warped valley. The Indian subcontinent 

 moved across the Indian Ocean and butted up against Asia, 

 and in the process the Ganges Plain was down-warped and the 

 Himalayas were pushed up sky high, a process which is still 

 happening. There's a lot of sediment there, and that 

 sediment is just like a sponge. It can hold a lot of water. 



So my idea was to store the water underground during 

 the monsoon season and to puir^ it up and use it during the 

 dry season, pump it up so you release space for water to 

 sink in during the next monsoon. You could store a lot of 

 water underground this way. One hundred million acre feet 

 of water could be stored in this sponge, this sedimentary 

 sponge, if there was space for it. ## 



We made some calculations which showed that if you 

 pumped on both sides of the river during the dry season, you 

 could lower the water table quite significantly in a few 

 years by several tens of feet. It would look like this, 

 [gesturing] Here's the river here, and the water table is 

 right close to the surface at the river, and if you pump 

 here you get the water table lower and lower. 



Then it partly fills up during the rainy season, 

 during monsoon, and the next year you pump it down still 

 more and you get still more storage. 



Well, we wrote a report on this and then 1 published a 

 paper in Science — with an Indian scientist. Professor 

 Lakshminarayana on this proposal for underground storage on 

 a very large scale in the Ganges Plain.* We showed how it 



