That's pretty neat, but it still must be desperate poverty, right? 60,000 Rupee is about $1,000 CAD.

Give it a few years and India will win an international chainsaw ice sculpting competition

My own punning stopped at "That's cool". Heebie exceeds expectations.

2 would be cool (nudge) but is unlikely because Ladakh has too few trees for chainsaws to make sense.

But OTOH they are Buddhist, and carving decorations on stupas that melt every year to water crops would the most Buddhist thing ever.

Also, I'm curious where else this might be applicable. Much of Central Asia and the Andes, obviously, but where else?

That's pretty neat, but it still must be desperate poverty, right? 60,000 Rupee is about $1,000 CAD.

Yes, but India is a very poor country. Rs 60,000 a year puts you at about the 11th percentile of per-capita income. https://wid.world/income-comparator/IN/

They don't elaborate why it's superior to a reservoir, but I guess it's that as ice it stays in place most of the time without walls / structure?

If the process was always "to hold the water that flows down (from glaciers) to streams in the winter months", e.g. the water arrives in liquid form, I'm a little unclear on how it refreezes into the new shape. Perhaps as they add more water the ambient temperature is cold enough it freezes just by making contact with existing ice, but that doesn't quite explain how they get the initial core frozen.

The bottom 10% of the income distribution in India, lower if you have a family, seems pretty poor to me.

8: there are perennial streams coming down to the village, even in winter when the temperature is below zero. But water can still flow when the temperature's below zero (rivers don't instantly freeze solid when the temperature drops to minus one!) because it's much easier to freeze standing water than running water.

Think about icicles, right? Those form because you have liquid water dripping in sub zero temperatures. The ice stupa is a big icicle.

They could have gone with stalagmice.

Yes. They missed a great opportunity.

That's very clever, and this increase in efficiency from the automation is astonishing:

After four months, the team found that the continuously sprinkling fountain had spouted about 1,100 cubic metres of water and amassed 53 cubic metres of ice, with the pipes freezing once. However, the automated system sprayed only around 150 cubic metres of water but formed 61 cubic metres of ice and the pipes did not freeze over.

But OTOH they are Buddhist, and carving decorations on stupas that melt every year to water crops would the most Buddhist thing ever.

Somewhat relatedly, Lynn White Jr. argues in Medieval Technology and Social Change that some important advances in rotary motion originated from Tibetan Buddhist attempts to rotate prayer flags more efficiently and continuously (there's also some connection to philosophical ideas about perpetual motion but I've just gotten to that part of the book). Not all of White's ideas are still taken seriously; not sure about this one.

RobertFrost made that argument fjrst:

But the best of her exhibit
Was a prayer machine from Tibet
That by brook power in the garden
Kept repeating Pardon, pardon;
And as picturesque machinery
Beat a sundial in the scenery
The most primitive of engines
Mass producing with a vengeance.
Teach those Asians mass production?
Teach your grandmother egg suction.
https://voetica.com/poem/863

It appears he did, yes. (Frost's last book was published in 1962, the same year as White's, but it appears that particular poem was first published in 1947.)

Obviously Frost wasn't being serious but maybe White read the poem, chuckled, paused, and thought "actually..."

Wikipedia says that the cone is less susceptible to evaporation (and sublimation?) than a (frozen?) pool of water would be, which if true, is the kind of physics I'm here for.