It is early July and Tashi Angchuck, 59, is having a busy morning. He checks the valves fitted on a thick plastic pipeline and notes down the metre reading of water flow.
Every drop of water counts in Igoo, Angchuk’s village 40 kilometres from Leh, the capital of Ladakh, which is a high-altitude cold desert in the northernmost part of India.
Igoo, spread across 13km in the rocky mountainous terrain of the Himalayas, houses 220 families. “Summers are crucial for villagers as the wheat, mustard, potato, and green peas we grow between April and July see us through the entire year. To cultivate them, we need assured irrigation at the time of sowing,” Angchuck tells Mongabay India. Ice stupas are a source of that precious water for them, he says.
Ice stupas are conical artificial glaciers built to store winter water in the form of ice. They melt in the summer months, providing timely irrigation water to farmers.
But the ice stupa 59-year-old Angchuck is referring to is no ordinary ice stupa; it is an automated ice reservoir or an ice stupa that runs “automatically”.
“The automated ice reservoir, built last winter, is a one-of-its-kind structure in Ladakh. It has sensors on its pipeline with an attached control board that makes a decision, based on local weather conditions, to allow or stop the mechanised valves from letting the water flow through the system,” explains Suryanarayanan Balasubramanian, CEO and Founder of Acres of Ice. His Leh-based company has built the automated ice reserve in Igoo at an altitude of 4,200 metres above mean sea level.
“Automation helps avoid freezing of water inside the pipeline that feeds the ice reservoir. Minimal intervention is required from the villagers to run the system, which is controlled remotely,” says Balasubramanian.
The glaciologist has been doing research on the automation of ice stupas for the past couple of years. In March, the automated ice reservoir was handed over to the residents of Igoo after training them in its upkeep and management.
“The automated ice stupa is a blessing for us. Otherwise, building and maintaining an ice stupa is a laborious process. We have done it in the past. But in a traditional ice stupa, there is a huge waste of water. In an automated ice stupa, minimal intervention is required from our side,” says Angchuck. He is a member of the Water Management Committee set up in Igoo to manage the functioning of the automated ice reservoir.
Farmers in Igoo are happy. “The new ice stupa allows me to water my field twice every day. Timely irrigation is crucial for us as there is only one crop in a year that we grow; for the rest of the year, it is too cold, and we remain cut off,” says 38-year-old Padma Yangdol, a resident of Igoo.
Farmers in Igoo mostly cultivate wheat (for self-consumption) and potato and green peas, which are sold. “Traders from Manali and Kashmir buy green peas from us. This way, a family is able to earn Rs 60,000-Rs 70,000 in a year from farming, only if we get water for irrigation,” says Angchuck, who was a soldier in the Indian Army for 30 years and is now actively working to address water problems in his village.
Tapping ice for water
People in the villages in the high altitudes of Ladakh are no strangers to artificially storing large volumes of ice. The Union Territory lies in the rain shadow zone – where dry monsoon winds reach Kargil with less moisture – of the Himalayas and receives an average annual precipitation (rain/snowfall) of only 100 millimetres.
The idea behind artificial glaciers and ice stupas is to hold the water that flows down (from glaciers) to the streams in the winter months. This water is stored as ice, which melts in springtime, just when the fields need watering.
Chewang Norphel, an 88-year-old retired civil engineer from Leh, also known as the Ice Man, popularised the concept of artificial glaciers in the cold desert.
In the late 1980s, Norphel and his team at the Rural Development Department came up with the idea of artificial glaciers, in which cascade-type walls were built over local streams in the higher reaches of Nang and Shara villages.
“The walls of an artificial glacier slow down and check water flow in the perennial streams. These allow ice formation in November and December. The ice formations melt in the spring season, providing water for irrigation at the time of sowing the crops,” Chotak Gyatso, executive director of Leh Nutrition Project, explains to Mongabay-India.
Gyatso’s nonprofit works with local communities and builds artificial glaciers in remote villages. “Through the Leh Nutrition Project, we have built over 15 artificial glaciers in the villages of Ladakh,” says Gyatso.
Since the 1990s, a number of nonprofits have built these ice structures in Ladakh. Sonam Wangchuk, an innovator and engineer, introduced ice stupas, which, unlike artificial glaciers, are vertical ice towers. These have become popular in Ladakh in the past decade.
Traditionally, ice stupas are built by assembling a conical structure made of soil, rope and grass. Water from a nearby stream is fed into the stupa through a pipe. This can be done either from below (fountain-style) or the top (sprinkler-style), which allows the sprinkled water drops to instantly freeze and form a tiny ice tower. In the summers, the ice stupa starts to melt, and villagers divert the water to their farmlands.
“Sometimes the water freezes inside the pipeline of traditional ice stupa, stalling its growth. Clearing a very heavy frozen pipeline is extremely difficult,” says Angchuck.
“In an automated ice reservoir, the control board decides, based on sensor input, whether or not water should flow through the system. If the weather conditions are not favourable, the valves let air in and push the water out of the pipelines to prevent any freezing,” explains Karuna Sah, communications specialist with Acres of Ice.
According to Balasubramanian, the automated ice reservoir in Igoo functions at more than 80% efficiency. Because of the automation, 80% of the water that flows into the ice reservoir is stored as ice.
Building an ice stupa is a laborious process and a lot of water is wasted, Gyatso says. “On the other hand, these problems are taken care of in an automated ice reservoir. One or two villagers can easily manage its functioning,” he explains.
Earlier, every time water inside the pipeline froze, a group of villagers (four-five people) had to go to the site and try to unblock the pipe. Removing frozen ice from inside the pipeline was very difficult and laborious, and that used to put off villagers, says Angchuk.
Ice stupas at Igoo
The pilot project to automate an ice reservoir started a year ago in two villages, Igoo and Nang. “Due to unfavourable weather conditions, we had to drop Nang. But we continued the work of building the automated ice reservoir at Igoo with the support of the local villagers and completed the project in March this year,” says Balasubramanian.
The automated ice reservoir at Igoo has a 300-metre long pipeline that brings water from the nearby stream to the site of the ice stupa. Two specialised fountain sprays sprinkle water that freezes. These drops of water build up into the ice reservoir, explains Balasubramanian.
The system has three mechanised valves fitted on the 300-metre-long pipeline along with a control board, which captures water flow data. This data is transferred to the mobile phones of members of the water management committee in the village and the company. “A small automatic weather station has also been set up alongside the automated ice reservoir at Igoo. The cost of the project is Rs 20 lakh,” says Balasubramanian.
The automated approach uses weather data to predict the optimal water-spray time, duration and flow rate to build ice stupas efficiently. This also prevents pipes from blocking up.
Angchuk maintains a record of the water flow into the ice stupa. “The valves tell us how much water has gone inside the ice stupa. So far, 65 lakh litres of water has flowed into the stupa, of which 44 lakh litres converted into ice and the remaining 21 lakh litres flowed back into the stream,” he says.
“The Igoo ice reservoir has four million litres of water stored in it. We are also collecting and collating data on weather, water flow and volume measurements. The ice reservoir will rebuild itself with minimal interventions by the villagers,” says Balasubramanian.
Before implementing the pilot project at Igoo, Balasubramanian tested this automation of ice stupas by building two ice stupas in Guttannen, Switzerland – one using a continuously spraying fountain and one using the automated system.
After four months, the team found that the continuously sprinkling fountain had spouted about 1,100 cubic metres of water and amassed 53 cubic metres of ice, with the pipes freezing once. However, the automated system sprayed only around 150 cubic metres of water but formed 61 cubic metres of ice and the pipes did not freeze over.
Cost, climate change
Balasubramanian agrees that the Rs 20 lakh is the project cost and is beyond the budget of most hill communities that are geographically and economically marginalised.
“Governments need to step up and implement automated ice reservoirs as rising temperatures and climate change are a huge threat to glaciers across the world. It is a direct threat to our water security,” he says.
As glaciers melt and recede, they leave behind glacial lakes, which increase the risk of glacial lake outburst flood, or GLOF, events in the Himalayan region. Harnessing this water safely and creating automated ice reservoirs, wherever possible, can help local communities.
In April this year, the Indian Space Research Organisation warned that glaciers across the Indian Himalayan region are melting at an alarming rate, leading to expanding glacial lakes.
Based on satellite data from 1984 to 2023, the Indian Space Research Organisation showed that of the 2,431 glacial lakes larger than 10 hectares identified in 2016-’17 across river basins, a staggering 676 lakes have grown markedly since 1984. This includes 130 lakes within India – 65 in the Indus basin, seven in the Ganga basin, and 58 in the Brahmaputra basin.
The Leh Nutrition Project is preparing proposals for the automation of ice stupas. “The Igoo pilot project is at an experimentation stage, but it appears to be promising. In Leh, we have about 30-40 artificial glaciers, including ice stupas. Automation can help the villagers avoid water wastage and provide assured irrigation water to farmers in the sowing season,” Gyatso says.
Angchuck is confident the automated ice stupa in Igoo will be a success. “Chhatri ki tarah paani phailata hai aur burf bana deta hai [it sprinkles water like an umbrella/fountain and immediately freezes water drops].”
The residents in the village, many of whom are unlettered, are invested in the success of the automated ice reservoir. Angchuck is leaving no stone unturned.
“My parents were very poor. I could not study as the school was five to six kilometres away from my village. But my life changed after I joined the Indian Army at the age of seventeen,” Angchuck says with pride.
“Tees saal desh ki sewa karke ab apne gaon ki sewa karni hai,” he adds. [After serving the country for 30 years, I will now serve my village].
This article was first published on Mongabay.
