- Lived:
- born 6 August 1959 in Daula village, Baghpat district, Uttar Pradesh; his life's work in the Alwar district of Rajasthan, from the Tarun Ashram at Bhikampura — living, as of September 2026
- Field:
- water conservation — community-built rainwater harvesting in dry country; head of Tarun Bharat Sangh; called Jal Purush, the Waterman
- The Big Idea:
- In dryland India the real reservoir is not a dam or a pipe but the ground under your feet. A village that digs small earthen ponds to catch the monsoon refills its own aquifer — and enough villages doing it, upstream to downstream, can raise a river from the dead.
- In their words:
- "The third world war is at our gate, and it will be about water." (to The Guardian, 2015; as of September 2026)
- If you remember one thing:
- A young Ayurvedic doctor arrived in a dying Rajasthan village in 1985 with medicine and literacy plans, and an old man told him the only medicine that mattered was water — stop talking, start digging. He dug. Thirty years and thousands of village-built ponds later, five rivers that had been dry for decades were flowing all year round, governed by a parliament of farmers with no legal power at all.