From an in-depth, heartwarming two-part article on permaculture projects in India:
we travelled south to the city of seven forts, Satara, to visit some of the spectacular work of the Paani Foundation.
There’s a lot of background to this story.
It begins with a super famous Bollywood movie star, Aamir Khan, who became aware of India’s water crisis as well as the solutions that were prevalent among a number of villages who had restored their depleted groundwater through extensive water harvesting and water management.
Aamir, along with a cohort of strong collaborators, began a contest to see which village in the state of Maharashtra could implement the most water harvesting structures with the highest quality of planning and construction in a 45 day period, timed in the dry season before the monsoon rains. Villagers were chosen from each area to undergo an educational program on watershed management, and then the contest began.
To date, there have been over 10,000 village contest entries, and over 1,000 of those villages have completely solved their water problems and restored their water tables.
Influencers on social networks are one thing. This is influence in its purest, most powerful and most wholesome form. In addition to holding celebrities accountable for the products that the endorse, one could encourage them to take up projects, give visibility to more causes than they already do. With the Internet there are orders of magnitude more celebrities than there were in the age of cinema and cricket – it means between them they can endorse the long-tail of causes.
Read both the articles for examples from Bidar/Karnataka, Kurnool/Andhra Pradesh, Chennai/Tamil Nadu, Pune/Maharashtra, West Bengal.