Johannesburg: Green activists and yogic monks have joined forces in a project that delves into ancient local traditions to bring water, the stuff of life, to remote villages in India's parched desert state of Rajasthan.

The scheme, unveiled at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, aims to bring rainwater harvesting to remote villages stricken by months without rain and struggling to survive after their conventional water supplies have all but dried up.

"The whole of Rajasthan state used to have traditional systems of harvesting the rain, but the methods fell into disuse," said Geoffrey Smith of Oz Green, an Australian environmental group that specialises in water.

"We want to empower villagers to draw on traditional methods such as building tanks on rooftops and piping to collect and store rainwater and find new underground catchment areas," said Swami Jasrajpuri of International Sri Deep Madhavananda Ashram Fellowship, a Vienna-based yogic organisation that is heading the initiative.

The Desert Rainwater Harvesting Initiative will begin in Pali, a district facing its worst drought in 40 years, where a fleet of 300 trucks fan out daily to provide water to 1,800 villages.

Jasrajpuri explained that Rajasthan's water problems are barely imaginable. The giant North Western state accounts for 10 per cent of India's land area, but gets only one per cent of the nation's water resources, Its 60 million people are in the jaws of a four-year drought. There has been no rain for 18 months and most dams and reservoirs have dried up, with groundwater steadily retreating while increasing in salinity.

The initiative will train villagers to build small dams and trenches to hold back flows of water; percolation tanks which capture the water and let it drain into spongey, underground rock where it is retained; and dig 'kunds', deep wells with a traditional dome-shaped roof that stops the water from evaporation

The Earth Summit is debating ways of halving by 2015 the number of people who have no access to safe and affordable drinking water.Some 1.2 billion people now lack access to safe water and over 2.7 billion will face severe water shortages by 2025 if no action is taken.

The start up money for this is coming from a $200,000 donation from the Ashram Fellowship's yoga associations, located in 26 countries around the world.

"There's a tendency now to look into big solutions for the water crisis such as building big dams and digging canals, but this involves huge investment, takes years to build and is not a solution for rural villages," said Jasrajpuri.