Every Punjabi village has or had a chhappar, a pond, usually where the earth for the houses was dug. It took the runoff, watered the cattle, and its silt was carried back to the fields as manure.
The cycle worked because the pond was cleaned. Silt was lifted, spread on the land, and the pond deepened again. When the tractor replaced the bullock and the tubewell replaced the pond for watering stock, the cleaning stopped.
Most village ponds in Punjab now take household sewage and nothing takes it out. They are anaerobic, they stink, and they contaminate the shallow aquifer that hand pumps draw from.
The Seechewal model, developed at Sultanpur Lodhi, treats village waste water in a simple settlement and filtration sequence and returns it to irrigation. It has been implemented in a number of villages and is cheap enough to be general.
The pond is the clearest small example of what happened to Punjab's rural infrastructure: a closed loop that worked, opened at one end, with nothing put in its place.
The pond took the village's runoff, watered the cattle, supplied the potter's clay and recharged the shallow aquifer under the settlement.
It now takes the village's sewage. Most Punjabi village ponds are eutrophic, foul and are a health problem rather than a resource.
The Seechewal and thapar pond restoration models treat the water and return it for irrigation. Where a panchayat has done it the pond works again, and the number that have is small.