案例库 · 战略与领导 · 战略决策 · 1986
这条还没译成中文，下面是英文原文。
Tarun Bharat Sangh revived a dead river with thousands of tiny dams
Rajendra Singh revived a dead river with thousands of tiny village dams, not one big dam.
Tarun Bharat Sangh (Rajendra Singh)
那一手
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.
为什么管用
- Small dams spread recharge across the whole watershed, so every well benefits.
- Village ownership gives locals a direct stake in maintenance, so dams last.
- Traditional knowledge made the technique cheap and socially acceptable.
- The river parliament coordinated water use, preventing over-extraction.
可以搬走什么
When a shared resource depletes despite one big fix, check if that fix is the bottleneck; many small local interventions may replenish it broadly.
后来呢
By 1990 the Arvari flowed again after 60 dry years; TBS built roughly 8,600-11,800 johads across 1,000+ villages, reviving 11+ rivers. Rajendra Singh won the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2001 and the Stockholm Water Prize in 2015, and the johad revival became a widely cited case for community-owned decentralized water infrastructure over large centralized dam projects in water-scarce regions.
资料来源
- Tarun Bharat Sangh
- The Waterman of India: How Magsaysay awardee Rajendra Singh revived 12 rivers across India
发现哪里写错了？告诉我们。