India's Green Champions
& World Lessons

“Water is life. Whoever protects water protects life itself.”

Rajendra came to rural Rajasthan to teach and found villages dying of thirst. Instead of a school, he built a johad — a traditional earthen check dam — with the community. Water returned. Then he did it again, and again. Over decades he mobilised thousands of villagers to build over 8,600 johads across the Aravalli hills. Five rivers that had run dry for years began to flow again. More than 1,000 villages now have water year-round.

“The ocean does not need our permission to be clean. It just needs us to stop.”

When lawyer Afroz Shah moved to a flat near Versova beach, he found it buried under years of garbage. He started cleaning alone one Saturday morning. A neighbour joined. Then ten people. Then hundreds. For 85 consecutive weekends — rain or shine — volunteers showed up. Over 12 million kg of trash was removed. The result was extraordinary: olive ridley sea turtles, absent for two decades, crawled onto Versova Beach and laid eggs again.

“I do not plant for fame. My heart tells me to do it, so I do.”

Born into the Halakki tribal community, Tulsi never attended a single day of school. Yet forest officials say she knows more about plants and trees than any textbook — she can identify every species, its medicinal use, and its role in the ecosystem just by looking at it. For over 60 years she has worked at the government forest nursery, nurturing over 30,000 trees. When the President of India awarded her the Padma Shri, she walked up barefoot to accept it.

“I just moved water from where it was useless to where it was needed most.”

Ladakhi farmers had a painful problem: their crops needed water in spring, but the natural glaciers only melt in summer. Retired civil engineer Chhewang Norphel had a simple idea — divert river water into shaded, flat channels in winter, let it freeze into a glacier, and let it melt slowly when farmers needed it. He built 15 artificial glaciers across Ladakh using this method. Over 10,000 farmers now have water at the right time of year.

“Every pond I clean is a water bank I open for the next generation.”

School teacher Ramveer Tomar watched the ponds of his village — the lifeblood of local farmers and groundwater — slowly choke with garbage and encroachments. After school, on weekends, he began cleaning them. He involved children, then parents, then whole communities. One by one, ponds that were completely dead came back to life. He has now revived over 35 ponds across UP, restoring groundwater and clean water to tens of thousands of families.

“Trees are my children. They give shade to everyone without asking anything in return.”

Thimmakka and her husband could not have children. So they planted trees instead — and raised them as their own. Starting with just 10 banyan saplings along a dusty highway, they carried water by hand to nurse each one. Over decades they lined 4.5 km of road with 385 banyan trees, then planted thousands more across Karnataka. Now in her nineties, she still visits her trees. "Saalumarada" in Kannada means "trees in a row" — a name her community gave her.

“Nature and communities are not obstacles to development — they are development itself.”

When a global mining company sought to extract bauxite from Niyamgiri — a mountain sacred to the Dongria Kondh tribe and the source of two rivers — Prafulla Samantara chose to fight. For over 25 years he organised the tribal community, fought legal battles through every court in India, and brought the case to the Supreme Court. The tribal communities voted unanimously in gram sabhas to protect their mountain. The mine was stopped. The rivers still flow.

“Guru Nanak sat on these banks and found enlightenment. How can we let it be a sewer? The river will flow clean again — I promise this.”

The Kali Bein is no ordinary stream. Guru Nanak Dev Ji — founder of Sikhism — meditated on its banks for three years. But by 2000, all 160 km of it had become an open sewer carrying raw sewage and industrial waste. Sant Seechewal waded in personally, knee-deep in filth, and began cleaning. Without government money, without machines, armed only with faith and sheer determination, he rallied thousands of volunteers. His community raised donations to build 11 sewage treatment plants on the banks. He lobbied successfully to have industrial discharge banned. Fifteen lakh trees were planted on the riparian belt. Today fish have returned to the Kali Bein for the first time in 50 years — and pilgrims walk its banks again. His model, called the "Seechewal Model," is now being studied for replication on the Sutlej and Yamuna.

“Your roof is a watershed. Every drop that falls on it belongs in the ground below you — not in the storm drain.”

When Hyderabad's borewells crashed during the 2002 drought, Kalpana Ramesh installed a rainwater harvesting system on her own rooftop and found it replenished her groundwater so completely that her borewells never ran dry again — even as her neighbours' ran empty. That single result became her life's mission. She founded The Rainwater Project, going door to door, school to school, office to office across Hyderabad, demonstrating RWH installations and training residents. She consulted the GHMC to make RWH mandatory in all new construction above 300 sqm. Her NGO has now installed systems in over 1,500 buildings, trained more than 10,000 residents, and collectively recharged over 100 million litres of groundwater per year. In a city built on hard granite rock with almost no natural aquifer, she is rebuilding the water table from the top down.

“Delhi's wetlands are invisible to most people. My job is to make the courts see them before the builders do.”

In a city where wetlands are routinely bulldozed for housing projects before anyone even knows they exist, environment lawyer and activist Vikrant Tongad chose to fight using the only tool that could outpace a bulldozer — the courts. He spent years personally documenting illegal construction at over 800 water bodies across NCR, photographing encroachments, collecting evidence, and filing PILs. When his case reached the Supreme Court, it directed all states to identify and notify wetlands within six months. Sanjay Lake and several other Delhi wetlands were formally gazzetted as protected areas. His decade of grinding legal work has stopped construction on wetlands that would otherwise have vanished under concrete — along with the migratory birds, amphibians and groundwater recharge they silently provided.

“We did not build the Cheonggyecheon. We simply got out of the way and let it come back.”

For 45 years, the Cheonggyecheon — a stream running 6 km through the heart of Seoul — lay buried under a concrete elevated highway and a 16-lane expressway. In 2003, then-mayor Lee Myung-bak made the audacious decision to tear both down and restore the stream. Engineers, economists, and urban planners warned of catastrophic gridlock and economic collapse. The project went ahead. What happened next astonished the world: temperatures along the restored corridor dropped 3.6°C compared to surrounding streets. More than 639 species of fish, birds, insects, and plants colonised the previously dead concrete channel. Property values within 1 km rose by over 50%. Pedestrian footfall tripled. Today the Cheonggyecheon is Seoul's most popular public space and the most studied urban water restoration project on Earth. Cities from Los Angeles to Bengaluru are using it to justify removing their own concrete rivers.

“In Singapore, no drop of water is ever wasted. Every drop is used, cleaned, and used again.”

When Singapore became independent in 1965, it had no rivers, no groundwater, and imported nearly all its water from Malaysia. A water cut-off could collapse the city-state within days. The government decided to solve this problem permanently, not patch it. They built a Four National Taps strategy over 60 years: collected rainwater in 17 reservoirs covering two-thirds of the island's land area; built the Marina Barrage to turn a tidal estuary into a freshwater reservoir in the heart of the city; developed NEWater — high-grade reclaimed water treated to WHO drinking standards, used in semiconductor factories, sports stadiums, and mixed into the reservoir supply; and built desalination plants for drought insurance. Today Singapore meets 40% of its needs from NEWater and 30% from desalination. By 2060 it will need zero water imports — a city of 6 million on 733 sq km with no natural freshwater rivers, completely water-independent. Every Indian metro is studying this blueprint.

“Day Zero was not a failure. It was the alarm that saved us. We just had to be brave enough to ring it loudly.”

In early 2018, Cape Town's six reservoirs had dropped to 13.5% usable capacity. Engineers set a date: Day Zero — the day the city would turn off all municipal taps and residents would queue at 200 distribution points with 25 litres per day. It would have been the first time in modern history a major global city ran completely out of water. Then something unexpected happened. Four million residents decided, collectively, that Day Zero would not come. The city set a 50-litre-per-person-per-day target — the international emergency survival threshold. People installed greywater systems, checked their neighbours' usage, reported leaks, and collectively cut usage by 58%. Day Zero was postponed, then cancelled. Cape Town is now the world's definitive proof that when citizens are told the truth about a water crisis and given clear targets, they will achieve the extraordinary.