Rajendra Singh has been listed among The Guardian‘s “50 People Who Could Save the Planet“. Better known as the Water Man of India, Singh was recently named the 2015 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate for his innovative water restoration efforts, improving water security in rural India, and for showing extraordinary courage and determination in his quest to improve the living conditions for those most in need.
Singh has dedicated himself for several decades to defeating drought and empowering communities in Rajasthan, the driest state in one of the world’s most populous nations. The results of his tireless work are without equal: in close cooperation with local residents, he and his organization Tarun Bharat Sangh have revived several rivers, brought water, and life, back to a thousand villages and given hope to countless people. Rajendra’s methods are modernizations of traditional Indian ways of collecting and storing rainwater, dating back thousands of years, and he believes this work offers “a way to solve both floods and droughts globally”, emphasizing the impact of water restoration at the local, national, and international level.