Two years of good rain, and still the wells in Sakat ran dry. The sky was never the problem.
In September 2025, after two consecutive years of good rainfall, you might expect the wells of Alwar to tell a single story. They don’t.
In Nanduwali, water sits close enough to touch. Four, sometimes five feet below the surface—in a season that isn’t even the wet one. Wells that were once dug deep in hope now overflow. Farmers who once managed a single crop in a year now harvest three. People from neighbouring villages come here to buy wheat. The river that runs through the area, once reduced to memory, flows through the year.
Thirty kilometres away, in Sakat, the wells are empty. Not low—empty. Two years of rain, and the earth has held none of it. Villagers lower buckets and bring them back dry. The rains came. They just didn’t stay.
Same sky. Entirely different ground.
The difference is not geological luck or some accident of terrain. It is the accumulated result of choices—of what was built, what was protected, and what was left to chance.
In Nanduwali, beginning around 2011–12, communities on both sides of the Mangalansar dam began working together on something that had no dramatic name: they started holding water. Johads—half-moon shaped ponds with earthen dams—were built on common land to catch and store rainfall before it could run off. Medbanis, semi-permanent structures with cement bunds, were placed along channels where heavy flow would otherwise carry away both water and soil. On individual farms, medbandis—small earthen bunds shaped to the specific slope and contour of each field—slowed water down, coaxed it into the ground rather than letting it race away. Forests were protected, not only for their own sake but because a healthy forest acts as a sponge: it intercepts rain, slows its descent, and allows it to seep steadily into the earth rather than arriving all at once and leaving all at once.
None of this is complicated in concept. All of it requires sustained collective will.
In Sakat, that infrastructure simply does not exist. No johads, anicuts or medbandis. When the rain arrives—even generously, even for two years running—it finds no reason to linger. It moves across the surface and is gone, carrying topsoil with it, leaving the land as dry as it was before the clouds came.
There is a particular cruelty to this kind of water poverty. It is invisible to the season. A visitor arriving in Sakat after the rains would see the same sky, the same hills, perhaps even the same green flush on the land that comes with any rainfall. The absence only reveals itself when someone reaches into the earth for water and finds nothing. It is a deficit that accumulates quietly over years of inaction, and one that a single good monsoon cannot fix.
Water security, it turns out, is not measured in rainfall. It is measured in what a landscape can hold.
In Nanduwali, the transformation took years and was never guaranteed. External funding arrived at some point and then, as it does, ended. The work continued anyway—through people’s own labour, their own resources, their own understanding of what they had built and why it mattered. Groundwater levels rose. Seasonal streams that had gone dry began flowing again. Wells recharged not just in Nanduwali but in surrounding areas, because water held in the ground does not respect village boundaries.
More than fifteen years later, the river still flows.
What makes this more than a water story is the question it raises about effort and time. The johads and medbandis of Nanduwali were not built in a single season. The forest was not protected once and then forgotten. This is the nature of the work: it is continuous, distributed across hundreds of individual decisions—where to place a bund, whether to let animals graze a particular slope, whether to cut a tree or leave it. The results are not visible immediately. They are visible a decade later, in a well that holds water when it shouldn’t.
Sakat’s dryness is not permanent. It is a condition, not a fate. But reversing it would require beginning now what Nanduwali began in 2011—and then continuing, past the point where the funding runs out and the enthusiasm dims and the work becomes ordinary.
Sambhaav’s water work exists in this space between the possible and the actual. The knowledge of how to hold water in this landscape is not foreign or imported—johads, medbandis, forest protection are all practices with deep roots here, approaches that communities once maintained as a matter of course. What has been lost, in many places, is not the knowledge but the collective habit of applying it.
Nanduwali is not a model to be replicated in a technical sense. Its specific johads and bunds are particular to its terrain, its drainage patterns, its land holdings. What can travel is something harder to package: the understanding that rainfall is only the beginning of the question, that the real work is what happens on the ground in every season between the rains.
The sky gives what it gives. The rest is up to us.