Community Open Spaces in Villages

In the dry months before the monsoon, the centre of a village in the Deccan is not a building but a body of water. The kere — the tank — sits low in the land, its stepped edge catching the morning. Women come down the steps to wash and to fill brass pots; a boy drives buffaloes into the shallows to cool; an old man sits on the temple's stone forecourt watching the surface. A hundred metres away, under a peepal tree so wide its branches have grown their own props, four elders sit on a circular masonry plinth and argue, without heat, about whose turn it is to clear the channel that feeds the tank. This is the chaupal in everything but name — the seat of the village's slow government. Beyond it, the threshing floor is swept and waiting; the cattle ground stretches towards the fields; at the very edge, screened by trees, lies the cremation ground.

None of this is landscaped. None of it appears on a plot plan as "open space, 15 per cent." Yet remove any one of these places and the village stops working — socially, ecologically, ritually. The true structure of an Indian village is not its houses but its commons: the shared, working, sacred and social open spaces that the houses are merely arranged around.

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The commons are not a park

It is worth saying plainly what this guide is not about, because the instinct of a trained planner is to reach for the wrong model. In an urban layout, open space is a designed amenity — a hierarchy of tot-lots, neighbourhood parks and a central green, sized as a percentage of plot area, mown and fenced and largely decorative. That world is covered in our companion piece on urban open space planning, and the difference matters: the urban park is consumed for leisure, while the village common is used for work, governed by custom and charged with meaning.

A village common earns its keep every day. The tank stores irrigation water and recharges the wells. The threshing floor processes the harvest. The grazing ground feeds the cattle that feed the village. The grove protects a spring or a deity. The square hosts the gram sabha, the festival and the funeral procession alike. These are not green spaces decorated with use; they are infrastructure, economy and faith that happen to be open to the sky. Designing for them — or, more often now, reviving them — means understanding each as a living institution, not as a quantum of grass.

The water at the centre: the tank and its steps

If a village has a single irreplaceable common, it is the tank — the johad of Rajasthan, the kere of Karnataka, the talab or pukur of the north and east. Built low to gather monsoon runoff, edged with stone steps or ghats, the tank is the most multi-functional space the village owns. It irrigates and it recharges the surrounding wells; its ghats are where clothes and vessels are washed; its surface cools the air and the cattle; its water and its banks carry ritual — the immersion at festival, the lamp set afloat, the morning bath.

The tragedy of the last few decades is how casually these were abandoned. Borewells made the tank seem redundant; silt filled it; its catchment was built over; in many cases the tank bed itself was "regularised" into housing plots. As the water table fell, villages discovered too late that the despised tank had been quietly recharging the very borewells that replaced it. The revival movement — the restoration of johads in Alwar, the kere-rejuvenation drives across Karnataka and Telangana, the use of MGNREGA labour to desilt and re-bund ponds — is really the rediscovery of a truth the village always knew. We treat the engineering of this in depth in the guide on water-sensitive rural planning; here the point is social: the tank is a common, and it survives only when the whole village holds a stake in keeping its catchment clear and its steps clean.

The social heart: the chaupal, the chabutara and the tree-plinth

Every village has a place where it becomes a single body — where news is exchanged, disputes are settled, weddings are negotiated and the gram sabha is held. In the north this is the chaupal; the raised platform is the chabutara; in the south and west it may simply be the temple forecourt or the square before the panchayat ghar. Its oldest and humblest form is the tree-plinth: a circular masonry seat ringing a peepal or banyan, shaded by a canopy that may be older than any building in the village. This was the original village seat, and it is no accident that the panchayat — literally the council of five — so often met beneath it.

The chaupal works because it is genuinely shared and lightly governed. It belongs to no one and serves everyone; its rules are custom, not bye-laws. A good revival keeps that quality. When a village builds a new community hall under a scheme, the building too often kills the square — people retreat indoors, the plinth is paved over for parking, the openness that made it a commons is lost. The better instinct is to repair the tree-seat, keep the square unbuilt, and let any new hall sit at the edge of the open space rather than in the middle of it. The square is the node where the village streets converge, and its design is really the design of a generous, shaded, walkable pause — not of a structure.

The working and the sacred commons

Beyond water and the square lies a whole family of open spaces, each with a job. The grazing common — the gauthan or charagah, the cattle ground — feeds the livestock that anchor the rural economy; Maharashtra's Gaothan and gauthan-development schemes have tried to formalise and protect it. The threshing floor, the khalihan, is the seasonal heart of the harvest: a hard, swept, open surface for threshing and drying grain, useless if shaded or built upon. The haat ground — the periodic market, held weekly or fortnightly — is where the village meets its region to trade; it needs an open, accessible, edge-of-settlement space that lies empty most days and overflows on market day. The school playground, often the only level open ground a village child has, doubles as a fair-weather meeting space and a helipad for emergencies.

Then there are the spaces that are open precisely because they must not be built: the sacred grove — the devarakadu, kavu, sarna or orans — a patch of forest protected by deity-fear for centuries, which today survives as one of India's richest reservoirs of native biodiversity and often as the guardian of a spring; and the cremation or burial ground, placed deliberately at the edge, downwind and downstream, screened by trees. To treat the grove as "vacant land" available for a building, or the smashan as land to be reclaimed, is to misread the village entirely. These commons are zoned by meaning, and the meaning is the protection.

The slow loss — and the deliberate revival

The single greatest threat to all of this is encroachment. Commons have no individual owner to defend them, which is exactly why they are vulnerable. A field-edge of the grazing ground is ploughed; a tank-bed is "regularised"; the square shrinks plot by plot as houses lean out; the grove loses a row of trees to a road. Each step seems minor; cumulatively they hollow out the village. The 73rd Constitutional Amendment gave the gram sabha — the assembly of all adult villagers — real standing to manage common land, and the SVAMITVA survey, by drone-mapping the abadi (the lal-dora inhabited area) and issuing property cards, has for the first time put many commons on an accurate record. That record is a double-edged tool: it can protect a common by naming it, or expose it to "development" if the village is careless. The protection ultimately rests on the gram sabha choosing to defend the common as a common.

Revival, where it has worked, has followed a pattern. It starts with the village re-valuing the space — usually because a crisis (a dry borewell, a flooded lane, a lost grove) makes its function visible again. It uses the labour and the schemes already available — MGNREGA for desilting tanks and building check dams, gauthan-development grants for the cattle ground, convergence funding under the SPMRM (Rurban) cluster for a cluster of villages. And it ties the individual common back into a system, which is the real prize.

Make it real: a green-and-blue network, governed by the gram sabha

A village's commons are strongest when they are read not as scattered plots but as a single green-and-blue network — the tank and percolation ponds (the blue) stitched to the grove, the grazing ground, the tree-lined lanes and the square (the green), with water and footpaths flowing between them. The tank's overflow can feed a percolation pond near the grove; the grove shades a stretch of the lane that leads to the chaupal; the threshing floor sits where the cart-track from the fields meets the settlement edge. Designed — or repaired — as a network, the commons do more together than the sum of their parts: they manage the village's water, hold its biodiversity, cool its lanes and carry its social life along one continuous, shaded, walkable spine.

For the panchayat-minded reader, the practical sequence is clear. First, map and record every common in the gram sabha resolution and the SVAMITVA cards — name them, so they cannot quietly vanish. Second, demarcate and defend the boundaries, removing fresh encroachment while the memory of the edge is still alive. Third, revive the function, not just the form — a tank with a blocked catchment is a pond, not a tank; a square with a hall plonked in it is a building site, not a chaupal. Fourth, link them into the green-and-blue network and into the wider settlement, the work of the rural housing layout design pillar that this guide sits within. Throughout, the governing body is the gram sabha, and the governing principle is custodianship rather than ownership.

This is, in the end, an old idea wearing a planner's vocabulary. Gandhi's village swaraj imagined the village as a self-governing organism with its commons at the centre; the network we draw today is the same body, mapped. A team using a tool such as DesignAI can sketch the commons network over a SVAMITVA base map and test how lanes, water and the square connect — but the intelligence that keeps a common alive has always lived in the village itself, in the people who still know whose turn it is to clear the channel that feeds the tank.

References

1. Ministry of Panchayati Raj, Government of India — SVAMITVA Scheme Guidelines (survey of abadi / lal-dora land and issue of property cards).

2. Government of India — The Constitution (Seventy-third Amendment) Act, 1992 (Panchayati Raj; gram sabha and management of common land).

3. Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India — Shyama Prasad Mukherji Rurban Mission (SPMRM): Framework for Implementation (Rurban cluster development and convergence).

4. Ministry of Rural Development — Mahatma Gandhi NREGA: Guidelines for Natural Resource Management Works (desilting of tanks, check dams, percolation ponds).

5. M. K. Gandhi — Village Swaraj (compiled writings) and Hind Swaraj (the self-reliant village and its commons).

6. Town and Country Planning Organisation — URDPFI Guidelines, 2014, Vol. I (rural settlement planning and common open spaces).

7. CPHEEO, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs — Manual on Water Supply and Treatment / rural water-body restoration practice (tank and pond rejuvenation).

Read this alongside its siblings on water-sensitive rural planning and village street planning, and explore how to map a commons network over your settlement with DesignAI.