Shiva Temples in Punjab in India Practice Water Conservation

One of the important offerings in Shiva Temple is water. Devotees offer water to bathe the Shivling. With ground water levels in Punjab in India fast depleting some Shiva temples have resorted to diverting the water offered to Shivling to underground.

Times of Indiareports 

If in two cases head priests of temples have prepared water recharging wells to return water being offered on Shivlings to the underground water table, another priest has made a slight shift in the ritual to save water. 

Interestingly, a politician played a vital role in prevailing upon religious personalities to make these environment- friendly changes at shrines and in rituals also. "Every devotee offers water on the Shivling and once BJP Rajya Sabha member Avinash Rai Khanna suggested that this water should not go waste and should be recharged. We then made a water harvesting system connected to the Shivling so that after filtration water flows back into the earth," said Swami Bhagwan Dass, who established the Shiv Temple in village Nangal Shaheedan, 4 kms from Hoshiarpur. "Now we are contemplating to harvest rainwater from the rooftops of the temple," he said.

In the Shiv Temple in village Sarthari near Nurpur Bedi, a similar water harvesting system has been put to use. Swami Mohan Giri of this temple said he has adapted saving water as his religious mission. "Another Shiv Temple is coming up at village Chanoli and I have persuaded the management there to have water recharging system connected with the Shivling," Giri revealed. 

He said that during every religious discourse he talks about saving water and urge people to take up the cause to prevent future rioting and wars for water. "When my father passed away sometime back, the priest who was conducting the last rites asked me to offer 365 buckets of water to a tree. Offering such a huge quantity of water just in one go without looking for its requirement for the tree appeared to me wastage of clean drinking water. I asked the priest to look for an alternative and then we offered 365 garwis (small traditional utensil) of water to the tree," Khanna told TOI. Priest Ashwani Kumar of Garhshankar, who made this shift, said that from then on he had been conducting other last rites in a similar manner.