Rajendra Singh
Rebuilding johads village by village until five Rajasthan rivers ran again.
The record
- Standing
- active practice
- Based
- Tarun Bharat Sangh · Alwar district, Rajasthan, India
- The structures
- Johads, rainwater storage tanks and check dams — modernised forms of long-standing Indian rainwater practice rather than imported engineering.
- The count
- From a single village in 1985, Tarun Bharat Sangh has helped build more than 11,000 johads and other water-conservation structures, bringing water back to over 1,000 villages and reviving five rivers.
- Recognition
- Stockholm Water Prize, 2015, presented by H.M. King Carl XVI Gustaf during World Water Week.
Standing is this studio’s placement of the work, not a ranking of the person, and it is the one line here that is a judgement rather than a cited fact.
The work
Singh is known in India as the Waterman, and the work is deceptively simple: small earthen catchment structures, built by the villagers who will use them, in a semi-arid district where the water table had fallen out of reach.
The scale is what makes it remarkable. Eleven thousand structures across four decades recharged enough groundwater that rivers which had become seasonal ran year-round again — an outcome achieved without a dam, a pump scheme, or a transfer canal.
The Stockholm Water Prize committee’s citation is explicit that the achievement is social rather than technical: water problems are not solved by science and technology alone, and Singh’s contribution was building local capacity to solve them, through participatory action, the empowerment of women, and the joining of indigenous know-how to modern technique.
Where to read them
Sources for this record
Corrections
This record was assembled from the sources above, and nothing in it was inferred to fill a gap. If it is about you and it is wrong, or you would rather not be listed, write and it changes.