Chewang Norphel Biography: Age, Early Life, Artificial Glaciers, Ice Man of India and Awards

He joined the rural development department of Jammu and Kashmir and worked in Ladakh for about thirty-five years. He has said there is hardly a village in the region where he did not build a road, a culvert, a bridge, a school or an irrigation channel, often with local stone and village labour because nothing else could be brought in.

Ladakh receives very little rain or snow. Its barley, wheat and vegetables are watered by streams fed by glaciers high above the villages. Those glaciers begin to melt in earnest only in June, but sowing must be done in April and May if the crop is to ripen in the short summer. Through the winter, meanwhile, water runs to waste down the valleys. As the natural glaciers shrank, the spring shortage worsened.

Norphel noticed that a thin stream left running from a tap near his home froze into a sheet of ice in the shade of trees, while the fast main stream did not freeze. If water could be slowed and spread out in the shade, it would freeze where it lay.

In 1987 he built his first artificial glacier above the village of Phuktsey. In late autumn the stream is diverted through a channel to a shaded north-facing slope not far above the fields. Low stone walls built across the slope slow the water to a trickle, and it freezes in steps through the winter. Because the ice lies thousands of feet lower than a natural glacier, it melts weeks earlier, just when farmers need to sow. The largest is about a thousand feet long and supplies several hundred families. Each costs far less than a dam or reservoir.

He retired in the mid-1990s and continued the work through a local voluntary organisation, the Leh Nutrition Project, building some fifteen glaciers in all, along with reservoirs and channels. His method inspired later variations, among them the conical “ice stupas” of Sonam Wangchuk.