“The idea is to harvest the rainwater to irrigate and to recharge the groundwater. The results have been very good. When we started, the water table was at 50 meters and was going down more than a meter a year. Now it’s coming up,” says P.K. Tripathi, BAIF’s thematic program executive who designed Khondla’s watershed development project. “I used to be a civil engineer, but now I like to say that I’m a social engineer.”