Chewang Norphel

16. Chewang Norphel Hailing from a middle-class family of Leh, Norphel studied at the Amar Singh College in Srinagar. He completed a diploma course in civil engineering from Lucknow in the year 1960. Sometime in June 1960, he joined the rural development department of Jammu and Kashmir in Ladakh as a civil engineer. As a child and a youngster it dawned on him that there was acute shortage of water faced by the inhabitants in the arid and cold climes of Leh and Ladakh. He was determined to provide succour to the local populace and to help them grapple with the scarcity of the most precious commodity – that is water. He figuratively became Bhagirath to bring the Ganges to the people of dry region and soon earned the sobriquet, ‘Ice Man’. The year was 1996 and Norphel joined the Leh Nutrition Project, a non-governmental organisation, as a project manager for watershed development. The keen eye of Norphel discovered a small stream which had frozen solid under the shade of a group of poplar trees, while it flowed with gay abandon elsewhere in his yard. He was perspicacious enough to analyse the reason for this strange natural phenomenon: the flowing water was moving too rapidly to freeze, while the sluggish trickle of water beneath the trees was slow enough to freeze. The mind of the civil engineer worked overtime and he created numerous artificial glaciers by diverting river water into a valley, by slowing the stream while constructing checks. The artificial glaciers augmented the ground-water recharge, rejuvenating the springs and consequently providing water for irrigation. He built them at lower elevations, so that they melt earlier, thereby expanding the growing season. By 2012, Norphel had successfully constructed 12 artificial glaciers. Norphel’s largest glacier is at the Phuktsey village. This is 1,000 ft long, 150 ft wide and 4 ft in depth. It has the potential to supply water to an entire village of 700 people at a cost of Rs 90,000. Documentary film-maker Aarti Shrivastava directed a short film on his life titled White Knight, which was screened at film festivals in India and abroad.