Water Shortage in India.

Manikandan remembers bathing with friends in the well near his house as though it were yesterday. But as the years passed, the well in Coimbatore district in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu dried up, as did the stream in Manikandan’s neighborhood. One year, when the stream remained dry even after heavy rains, the bike mechanic decided to find out what had gone wrong.

He and a friend took a bike ride to trace the stream’s route. They found a defunct check dam in its path — hence the rainwater flowed into the ocean. It was the first of multiple water-shortage challenges that Manikandan would resolve to fix. Tamil Nadu, which is south India’s largest state, and its capital Chennai — with a population of close to 10 million people — have hit global headlines in recent years for both devastating floods (2015) and crippling droughts (2018). The floods rendered thousands of people homeless overnight, and the drought was one of the worst the state — which has 39,000 bodies of water — had seen in 70 years.

But even as the elected government has struggled in the face of these extreme weather events, ordinary citizens, from villages to neighborhoods in Chennai, have taken it upon themselves to revive dead or dying neighborhood lakes and wells. And they are having success that is turning this citizen activism into a model with relevance for  and potentially for other challenges as well, from wildlife conservation to reconstruction after forest fires.

In 2018, farmers in Peravurani, a village in the coastal district of Thanjavur, formed a network — Kadamadai Area Integrated Farmers’ Association — that has since revived 70 dead water bodies in the region, says Karthikeyan, a farmer and group member. Volunteers clear debris, plant vetiver crops to strengthen bunds, create mini forests within the lake, and repair canals and pathways. Pockets of the district that had been dry for decades now have water.