Rajendra Singh
Tarun Bharat Sangh & The Flow Partnership – India/UK
Rajendra Singh is an Indian water conservationist and environmentalist from Alwar district, Rajasthan in India. Known popularly as the “Water Gandhi,” or “Water Man of India”, Rajendra Singh has been instrumental in fighting the slow bureaucracy, mining lobby and has helped villagers take charge of water management in their semi-arid area as it lies close to Thar Desert, through the use of johad, rainwater storage tanks, check dams and other time-tested as well as path-breaking techniques. Singh assists the Indian Government with empowering planning, financing, monitoring and coordinating authority for the Ganges River. In the UK he is a founder member of an NGO called the Flow Partnership, which aims to counter the negative effects of soil erosion and flooding. He is also the winner of Stockholm Water Prize 2015; an award known as “the Nobel Prize for Water”.
Rajendra Singh was born at village Daula in Bagpat district in Uttar Pradesh near Meerut. His father was an agriculturist and looked over their 60 acres of land in the village and where Singh did his early schooling. An important event in his life came in 1974, when still in high school, Ramesh Sharma, a member of Gandhi Peace Foundation visited their family home in Meerut, this opened up young Rajendra’s mind, to issues of village improvement, as Sharma went about cleaning the village, opened a vachnalaya (library) and even got involved in settling local conflicts.
Through these types of inspirations, Singh has helped to create over 8,600 Johars (crescent shaped dams) in over 1000 villages in Rajasthan. These dams are essential for rainwater harvesting, and have led to the successful restoration of tens of thousands of trees. He has revived five rivers in Rajasthan: Arvari, Ruparel, Sarsa, Bhagani and Jahajwali. Using these simple earthworks and similar methods, he was instrumental (in small villages at first and eventually across the Indian countryside) in reversing the over-use of bore holes that would deplete the water table. Instead, he actively encouraged the local use of practical means of water conservation. He also played a pivotal role in stopping the controversial Loharinag Pala Hydro Power Project over river Bhagirathi, the headstream of the Ganges River in 2006, even as G. D. Agrawal, environmentalist from IIT Kanpur went on a hunger strike.
Singh presented his work at the Global Earth Repair Conference in 2019, and greatly enriched the conversations there with his practical wisdom. The struggle for the life and devoted water conservation efforts of Rajendra Singh is being produced by the film producer and director Ravindra Chauhan under the name of the documentary Jal Purush Ki Kahani.
Websites:
1) Tarun Bharat Sangh
2) https://www.theflowpartnership.org/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theFlowPartnership
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/watermanofindia/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-flow-partnership/about/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/FlowPartnership
Video 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgUBy-XmKJc
Video 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEFOLZ3vxvc
