"Here at the International Conference on Freshwater the ministers have not even talked about rain water harvesting, let alone know anything about it," said Bunker Roy, the founder and CEO of Barefoot College an Indian non-governmental organization (NGO) and the chairperson of the panel at the side-event.

The panel entitled, Rainwater Harvesting for Drought Proofing Villages in Developing Countries, featured speakers from India, Africa and Brazil who shared their experiences about rain water harvesting. "We only invited people who do not get to change to speak at big conferences such as this," said Roy.

"I do not know why people neglect this type of water collection system," said Fadul Beshit El-Hag who is a project director for the Adventis Development and Relief in Sudan. All the speakers spoke of its cost effectiveness and sustainability. They said that rain water harvesting was a tool to empower women.

In developing countries women have to travel great distances in order to get water. Roy showed a short film set in India where a young woman told how she has to wake up at four in the morning to get water from a public tube well. She went on to say that it is often very crowded and she is unable to get a lot.

The panelists argued that having rain water harvesting in homes would allow women to obtain water easily. They stressed that hand pumps and piped water supply schemes for rural water supply are not sustainable in the long run. They said that these deplete the water table.

At a press conference following the side event the panelists told reporters that rain harvesting mechanisms have been in place throughout history. "People moved away from the [rain harvesting] because engineers came and brought development," said Gourisankar Gosh, Executive Director of the Geneva-based Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council. He went on to say that, "Technology took people's rights and people's choice." He called the concept of capturing rain water a key to sustainable development and called technology a virus.

Sticking to the old ways of harvesting rain water, encourages decentralization which governments are not very keen on, according to Nafisa Barot, a representative of Utthan, an Indian grass-root level organization. "Governments are scared to decentralize because its giving the power to the people. Governments do not want change," she said.

Echoing her sentiments El-Hag said, "Governments are not close to indigenous people and do not know their technologies."

Roy agreed but was more forceful in his comments, "These people [the ministers at the Freshwater Conference] are somewhere in Mars. They talk and think about things that are so far off the ground," he said.

The panelists are at this Freshwater Conference in the hopes that their voice will be heard. They are here to promote traditional wisdom and technique. They did not however speak of a combination of technologies, both old and new, in the development of sustainable water resource management.