Tarun Bharat Sangh revived a dead river with thousands of tiny dams

Rajendra Singh arrived in Gopalpura village in Alwar district, Rajasthan, in 1985 as a trained Ayurvedic doctor. A villager, Mangu Kaka, told him bluntly: "We don't need medicine, we don't need education. We need water." Mangu Kaka spent two days walking Singh to 25 dry wells so he could see the groundwater problem firsthand — a crash course that redirected Singh's entire mission.

Government drought response in the region ran on large centralized infrastructure — dams and borewells built by contractors on budgets running into hundreds of crores of rupees. But a large dam captures water at a single point upstream, and the region's growing reliance on deep borewells was pushing the water table further down with each new one, rather than replenishing it. The state irrigation department also actively opposed local water-harvesting efforts, asserting the government's own claim over regional water rights.