In Rajasthan’s government schools, fixing a broken borewell is only the beginning
In 2017, someone dug a borewell at Siyaluta government school in Rajgarh, two hundred feet into the earth. Within two years, it was dry. For the years that followed, the school called a water tanker every alternate day—when it could afford to. When it couldn’t, children brought water from home.
That borewell sat there, a quiet record of something attempted and lost, until the question was asked differently: not how to find water, but how to hold onto the water that was already coming.
What the ground can hold
A rainwater harvesting system was built at Siyaluta. An old storage tank on the premises, long defunct, was repaired and connected to it. The principle is not complicated—catch rain where it falls, slow it down, let it sink. The borewell, now being fed rather than only drawn from, began to recover. Today it runs two to three hours daily, even in dry months.
In Dharampura, Dausa, teacher Anil Sharma had watched the trees in his school compound weaken over years—mature amla and neem, struggling in low groundwater laced with fluoride. The school had an underground taanka, silted up and long disconnected. It was cleaned, repaired, linked to the rooftop. The borewell that used to run an hour or two a day now runs four to six, and the water it delivers tests free of fluoride.
Across thirteen government schools in Alwar and Dausa—each chosen for the severity of its water shortage—the work took different shapes depending on what each school had and what it lacked. A taanka here, a recharge pit there, a rooftop connection that didn’t exist before. Each intervention was built on a shared condition: the school community contributed at least a quarter of the cost. Parents pooled money. Teachers organised. The ownership was part of the design.
What grows after
Once there is water, something else becomes possible.
But the work doesn’t stop at the infrastructure. A generation of children in rural Rajasthan is growing up more distant from the land around them than any before—not through any fault, but as a quiet consequence of how life has shifted. The practical knowledge that once moved between generations through farming, water management, and forest use is thinning. The idea, then, was to begin with what children could see and touch—to take them somewhere first, before asking them to do anything.
Getting children out of school is harder than it sounds. Block Education Officers rarely grant permission for students to leave the premises—the responsibility feels too large, the risk too undefined. In practice it falls to individual teachers and principals to make it happen, and often it doesn’t. At Siyaluta, Principal Kiran Gujjar spoke to parents one by one, took their concerns seriously, and took responsibility herself. Without that, the visit would not have occurred.
The places children are taken to are not distant or unfamiliar in landscape—they are nearby, recognisable, rooted in the same terrain these children grow up in. In Nanduwali, students have stood at the edge of a river that was once reduced to dry bed and now flows through the year, and heard from the people who live there how that happened—slowly, through johads and medbandis and years of collective effort. Near Sariska, they have walked through a patch of land where Pradeep Chaudhary spent fifteen years planting more than 500 varieties of herbs and trees on what had once been rocky and bare. The point is not the scale of what was done. The point is that it was done by people who speak the same language, know the same heat, and started with the same land.
Children often return from these visits carrying saplings. They plant them in their school compounds, in the baadis—small vegetable patches that some schools have now begun maintaining entirely on their own. Students water them, weed them, watch them. Each sapling gets attached to two students for care taking. Kajal, a student from Dharampura, said that being outside, in direct contact with land and people working on it, had settled something in her—a sense of what she actually cared about.
In Jaipur, Barmer and Jaisalmer, a group of interns from Azim Premji University developed nature-based learning modules for government school children with help of Sambhaav—material that brings ecology into the classroom through doing rather than telling. It is an approach worth carrying forward into more schools.
A repaired borewell is visible and measurable. A child who returns from a field visit and plants a sapling and tends it through a dry month is harder to account for, but perhaps closer to what this work is actually about—the slow building of a relationship between young people and the land they will one day make decisions about. The school, it turns out, is as good a place as any to begin.
Links to the three Flickr albums used: Album 1 (Exposure Visit), Album 2 (Syaluta School), Album 3 (Dharampura School)