Dr Rakesh Verma
rakeshforests@gmail.com
In the undulating foothills that stretch like a living hem along the Shivalik range, the kandi belt of Jammu carries an ancient wisdom about water, soil, trees, and community. Here, ponds are not incidental depressions in the earth; they are deliberate, enduring, shared institutions-built by hands, held in faith, and kept alive by habit. The Dogra countryside has long referred to them as talabs, chappads and sars, a vocabulary that conveys not merely a physical form but a social purpose. To understand the kandi, one must begin with the ponds: their historical genesis, the cultural frames that sustain them, their spiritual resonance, their agricultural necessity, and the living green crowns of peepal, bargad, and kadam trees that guard their margins like sentinel elders.
Historically, the kandi belt is a rain-shadowed, drought-prone landscape. Seasonal streams-khads and choes-are ephemeral torrents in the monsoon and silent stony beds in summer. For such a land, the pond is a deliberate technology. In village after village, community embankments were raised with clay and laterite, catchments were guided with stone bunds, spillways were cut, and desilting pits were ritually cleaned at the end of each season. Dogra rulers and local chieftains, as well as clans and panchayats, sponsored tanks for forts, caravan halts, and temples. The ponds captured the monsoon’s brief generosity and stretched it across months, replenishing wells, energizing soil moisture, and sustaining livestock. This was governance by water and shade, a localized hydrology authored by people who knew their slopes and soils intimately.
Beyond their engineering, ponds entered the rhythm of Dogra life as social commons. Villagers gathered at the talab for news and negotiation, for seasonal labor, and for rites of passage. Water-carriers, herders, and farmers intersected along the same bunds. In the early mornings, women drew water while exchanging counsel; in the evenings, elders sat below the peepal leaves’ murmuring gloss, resolving disputes and settling accounts. The panchayat’s authority often found spatial expression on the pond’s steps, where decisions about irrigation rotation or communal labor-shramdaan for desilting-were announced. The pond, thus, assembled the village, and the village, in turn, maintained the pond.
Agriculturally, the kandi landscape is a tightrope: monsoon-fed maize in kharif, and rabi crops-mustard, wheat, gram-relying on residual soil moisture and careful, sparing irrigation. Ponds, both public and private, are the lifeline for lifesaving watering in dry spells. In years of fickle rain, a single pond can mean the difference between a harvested field and a withered stand. The ponds re-charge shallow aquifers, making dug wells viable longer into summer; they temper the microclimate, reducing wind stress and edge evapotranspiration around fields; they supply water for small vegetable plots that diversify diets and incomes. Livestock-an integral asset in Dogra homes-depend on these ponds for drinking water and wallowing, especially buffaloes that sustain local dairying. In the margins of larger ponds, fisheries have made unobtrusive inroads: common carp, rohu, and catla glint under the lilies, adding to household protein and occasional market sales. By any measure, the economic footprint of a well-maintained pond spreads wide and quietly.
The architecture of the pond and its surrounding grove tells stories of adaptation. Many older ponds feature a clay core bund supported by a stone pitching on the inner slope, with a grassy outer slope to resist erosion. Spillways, sometimes lined with flat stone slabs, release excess water into a safe channel that runs to the nearest khad, preventing breaches during cloudbursts. Earthen inlets filter runoff through silt traps-small pre-pond pits where heavier sediments settle, sparing the main basin from excessive deposition. In village accounts, families recall annual desilting as a festive labor: men and women, their feet slick with clay, forming human chains to lift and toss baskets of silt onto the fields, where it enriches soil. The boundary between pond and farm is not a hard edge, but a reciprocity-nutrient-rich silt returns to crops, while the field’s contour bunds shoulder water toward the pond.
At the heart of this system is knowledge: when to open the sluice for irrigating, when to repair a scoured embankment, how to manage invasive weeds like water hyacinth, where to plant a new tree to anchor a failing edge. Much of this is unwritten but widely shared, transmitted across generations. Elders remember the high-water marks of extraordinary monsoons etched into the steps of the ghat; youngsters learn to judge water clarity by the visibility of a submerged stone. The practical merges with the sacred: the annual pond-cleaning may coincide with a festival, the first post-monsoon dip may be a ritual of gratitude.
Within the larger geography of Jammu, some ponds have become landmarks. Rani Talab in Samba is one such pond, well known for its historical associations and as a community gathering place-a water body that has long fed gardens and drawn faithful to its banks. In Jammu city, Gole Talab in Gandhi Nagar has been a social magnet, a green breathing space shaped around a traditional tank. Scattered across the kandi, many temple complexes front small ponds-kunda-like sarovars where devotees bathe or offer lamps. In and around Akhnoor, the Kameshwar Temple maintains a sacred pond that, though modest in size, carries a heavy echo of memory for pilgrims. The temple towns of Purmandal and Uttar Behni are threaded by the Devika River rather than ponds per se, yet their ghats and occasional temple tanks participate in the same cultural grammar of water, ritual, and shade. And while Mansar and Surinsar are lakes rather than village ponds, they form the headliners of the region’s water heritage-a reminder that small talabs and grand lakes exist along a continuum of cultural waters.
The kandi belt covers a broad swath across Kathua, Samba, Jammu, Udhampur, Reasi, parts of Rajouri and Poonch-their villages nested among scrubby hills and fields of maize, mustard, and wheat. In these districts, nearly every village once had multiple ponds: a main talab for irrigation and rituals, cattle ponds for livestock, and smaller recharge pits around hamlets and common lands. Place names still echo this: talab chowks as crossroads, sars as references in land records, nagars known for their temple tanks. In recent decades, however, this watery web has frayed. Urban sprawl and road expansion have straightened old drainage lines, reducing runoff into ponds. Encroachment has nibbled at embankments, while silt from upstream contour changes fills basins. Plastic and wastewater have polluted many a clear pond, and the social duty to clean and celebrate the talab has faded with migration and changing livelihoods.
Yet, the revival stories are real and multiplying. Under watershed programs and rural employment schemes, desilting and bund strengthening have restored capacity in dozens of kandi ponds. The Jal Shakti mission’s focus on water security has encouraged panchayats to rehabilitate old talabs and dig new percolation tanks. In parts of Samba and Kathua, contour trenches above villages now slow rainwater long enough for ponds to receive a steady, filtered flow rather than destructive torrents. In Jammu district’s peri-urban areas, resident welfare associations have adopted ponds as green commons, planting peepal and kadam saplings, adding silt traps, and reviving the practice of annual cleaning. When revival is done with a respect for traditional forms, the results are more than hydraulic; they are social renewals.
This is not nostalgia. In a climate where rains can arrive in violent clusters and summers are hotter and longer, the pond is a modern adaptation as much as a heritage relic. Technical upgrades sit easily on the old skeleton: simple sluice gates with adjustable boards to ration irrigation; stone-lined spillways to protect embankments; vegetative buffers of vetiver and doob grass to limit erosion; recharge shafts bored in the pond floor to fast-track filtration to deeper aquifers. Fencing against stray cattle can be achieved without walling off people-barbed or live hedges punctuated by access steps. Replacing chemical weed control with manual harvesting and biological checks keeps the pond’s ecology sound and its fish healthy. Solar lights around the bund deter dumping and make evening use safe, transforming the talab into a civic space.
Culturally, re-centering the pond means re-planting the tree and re-anchoring the shrine. New community plantings of peepal and banyan-often with women’s self-help groups as custodians-have seen good survival rates where watering circles and mulching are organized. The kadam, underplanted near the ghat, draws pollinators to its globes of orange flowers and beckons children to gather in the shade. When schools integrate pond walks into environmental education, a new generation learns to read the water line and listen to the frogs. Artists and folk singers, too, have kept the water alive in Dogri songs about love and seasons: the lover waiting by the banyan, the monsoon reflected in a winking lamp on the water. Faith-based organizations that hold satsangs under the peepal often lead clean-up drives, turning devotion into stewardship.
Socially, the pond can reduce inequity. Where large landholders can drill deeper for water, small and marginal farmers depend on communal storage. A functional pond, governed with fair irrigation schedules and transparent maintenance rules, supports the smallest plots and the landless who keep livestock or fish. Women’s time is saved when the nearest clean water is a few well-kept steps away rather than a distant, risky walk. Public health improves as stagnant drains are redirected and aerated through pond systems. In the brewing heat waves, the shaded bunds become informal cooling centers-places where the vulnerable can sit out the worst of the afternoon.
Economically, a handful of modest interventions can stack benefits. Introducing polyculture fish in larger ponds creates a micro-enterprise for youth. Establishing community nurseries of peepal, banyan, and kadam provides saplings for the village and for sale to nearby panchayats, with the pond’s edge as a moist micro-site for raising plants. Renting out ghat space for small, regulated fairs during festivals brings income to the pond committee’s maintenance fund. Linking pond silt distribution to soil health cards helps farmers time applications for best effect. Each of these is small; together, they make the pond fiscally resilient.
The biodiversity halo of ponds is a story still being written. Amphibians breed in the shallows; dragonflies keep mosquitoes checked; waterbirds commute across the countryside, using talabs as stepping stones between larger wetlands. The Gharana wetland near the border, while a different ecosystem, benefits from a landscape of smaller water bodies that feed and rest migratory birds. In the kandi itself, village ponds harbor egrets, moorhens, dabchicks, and the electric blue of kingfishers. Children learning to name these species form bonds that translate into a citizen watch over dumping and desecration. Where the pond meets the field, hedgehogs, civets, and jackals slake their thirst, and owls hunt along the bund.
For all their virtues, ponds are fragile. The enemy is not only neglect but also a failure of imagination-the idea that piped water removes the need for local storage. Piped supply depends on sources; sources depend on recharge; recharge depends on slowing, spreading, and sinking rain. The pond performs that task with humility and a memory the earth understands. If we seal the soil and straighten the stream, we collapse the buffers that have kept the kandi habitable. The moral then is not to romanticize the past, but to integrate the past’s lessons with the present’s tools.
In mapping the most important ponds of Jammu today, one must blend renown and representative value. Rani Talab in Samba remains iconic for its history and as a model of urban-edge restoration. Gole Talab in Gandhi Nagar stands as a reminder of how rapidly urban growth can overwhelm traditional water and how civic initiative can reclaim it. The temple ponds of Kameshwar in Akhnoor and similar sarovars across the kandi taluka are spiritual anchors that still draw collective labor. Numerous village ponds across Kathua and Samba-smaller, unnamed, yet essential-have been revived under panchayat leadership and now serve as living classrooms for neighboring villages. To this list, one must mentally append the great cousins of the pond-Mansar and Surinsar lakes-because they remind us that the region’s water heritage is a continuum, from small village sars to larger sacred lakes, all threaded by forests and faith.
The future of the kandi’s ponds will be shaped by three commitments. First, protection: legal recognition of ponds as commons, with clear boundaries, buffer zones, and penalties for encroachment and pollution. Second, participation: pond committees that include women, small farmers, and youth, with transparent accounting and a calendar of maintenance that is announced and celebrated. Third, pedagogy: embedding pond literacy in schools, festivals, and media so that the everyday art of water-judging silt, planting trees, cleaning inlets-is seen as a civic skill. In parallel, technical support from the state-designing spillways, standardizing silt traps, funding desilting-can amplify community efforts rather than replace them.
When evening comes to a kandi village, the peepal’s leaves seem to whisper even when the air is still. A lamp might be set afloat by an old woman at the ghat, its reflection stretching and retracting over the water, a domestic aurora. The buffalo, slick and content after their bath, lumber back to sheds. Children press damp clay into shapes-fish, birds, seed pods-while men check the bund for burrows and cracks. The pond holds all of these acts without fanfare. It holds the sky upside down, it holds the village together, it holds the future in a shallow bowl that deepens with care. If there is a single, living culture of the Jammu kandi belt, it is this: the culture of water stretched across the year, of trees wrapped around the water, and of people wrapped around both. In that embrace, the peepal and the bargad keep their watch, the kadam seasons the air, and the pond remains-ancient, useful, sacred, and indispensable.
(The author is from J&K Forest Services)
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