Rajendra Singh of India has been named the 2015 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate, for his innovative water restoration efforts and work to improve water security in rural India via rainwater harvesting.

Mr Singh, born 1959, lives and works in the arid Indian state of Rajasthan, where he has for several decades dedicated himself to defeating drought and empowering communities. The results of his tireless work are without equal: in close cooperation with local residents, he and his organization have revived several rivers, brought water, and life, back to a thousand villages and given hope to countless people.

Receiving news about the prize, Mr Singh said:

 “This is very encouraging, energizing and inspiring news. Through the Indian wisdom of rainwater harvesting, we have made helpless, abandoned, destitute and impoverished villages prosperous and healthy again.”

In its citation, The Stockholm Water Prize Committee says:

 “Today’s water problems cannot be solved by science or technology alone. They are instead human problems of governance, policy, leadership, and social resilience. Rajendra Singh’s life work has been in building social capacity to solve local water problems through participatory action, empowerment of women, linking indigenous know-how with modern scientific and technical approaches and upending traditional patterns of development, resource use, and social norms.”

Torgny Holmgren, SIWI’s Executive Director commented:

“In a world where demand for freshwater is booming, where we will face a severe water crisis within decades if we do not learn how to better take care of our water, Mr Singh is a beacon of hope. He has literally brought villages back to life. We need to take Mr Singh’s lessons and actions to heart if we are to achieve sustainable water use in our lifetime.”

After studying Ayurvedic medicine and surgery, Rajendra Singh went into the countryside in the largely impoverished state of Rajasthan in the mid-1980’s with the aim of setting up health clinics. Instead, he was told by villagers that the greatest need was not health care, but water.

With the help of the villagers, he set out to build johads, or traditional earthen dams. Two decades after Rajendra Singh arrived in Rajasthan, 8,600 johads and other structures to collect water had been built with water brought back to 1,000 villages across the state. Mr Singh and his co-workers in Tarun Bharat Sangh (India Youth Association) also enabled water to flow again in several rivers of Rajasthan.

The methods used by Mr Singh are modernisations of traditional Indian ways of collecting and storing rainwater, dating back thousands of years. The methods fell out of use during British colonial rule, but have now brought water back to the driest state in one of the world’s most populous nations, thanks to the “Water man of India” and his colleagues.

Climate change is changing weather patterns around the world, leading to more frequent and intense droughts and floods. Learning how to harvest rainwater, cutting the peaks of water to fill the troughs, will be a key skill in most parts of the world.

Rajendra Singh said that due to the harvesting of rain and recharging groundwater, there is no scope for drought or floods in the  area and the work was a way to solve both floods and droughts globally.

H.M. King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, Patron of the Stockholm Water Prize, will present the prize to Rajendra Singh at a Royal Award Ceremony during 2015 World Water Week in Stockholm on 26 August.