Water Heroes: Chewang Norphel (The Iceman)

Published on July 20, 2012 14:50 by Water Network Research, Official research team of The Water Network in Social

The "Ice Man". Sounds like a pretty cool super hero, and he kind of is. But you won't find this super hero up on the big screen; you'll find him in the Himalayas. The Ice Man is actually 76 year old Chewang Norphel, a retired engineer in India that came up with an ingenious way to provide water to rural villages: artificial glaciers.

Chewang grew up in Ladakh, a remote part of India high in the mountains near the Himalayas. After going to school and studying science and civil engineering he went to work for the rural development department of Jammu and Kashmir in Ladakh in 1960. He retired from that job in 1995, but soon went back to work with the Leh Nutrition Project, a NGO, as project manager for watershed development and later as their director, a position he holds to this day.

His idea started to develop soon after retiring in 1995 while Chewang was in his yard and noticed that water from a stream had frozen in the shade of a tree, but flowed freely everywhere else. After thinking about this for a while he realized that the water had frozen because it flowed slower in the area under the tree, while the rest of the water flowed quicker. This realization led to Chewang developing an ingenious idea and being known years later as the Ice Man.

Media