Rural

Fashioning change

Water improves agriculture. Agriculture improves animal husbandry. People begin to take care of their watershed, which means more trees and forests. With watershed development, prosperity beckons.

Going beyond water is a philosophy and a practice. Some have gone beyond water to alleviating, actually eradicating, rural poverty. They have dared to traverse the path from ecological regeneration to economic miracle, from water to wealth.

Those with this water vision overwhelmingly belong to civil society.

All of them have developed watersheds as a platform for social change.

Quietly at work

Taking forward the work of these pioneers are those invisible rural engineers who don't go to Indian Institutes of Technology to try and do quantum physics, or genome or defense research in the US for the US.

These rural engineers prefer to find ways to better harvest the rain. And so fashion local ecological and social change.