Uncovering India’s Ancient Water Secrets Amidst Drought Bites

In 2025, water from the Moosi Rani Sagar, a stepwell in the city of Alwar in Rajasthan, India, spilled over the footpath for the first time in more than 30 years.

Water scarcity and climate change are driving communities to restore traditional water structures built centuries ago, bringing them back into use in the 21st Century.

Reviving Ancient Water Secrets

Across India, hundreds of communities are reaching the same conclusion. Once viewed as cultural relics, long-abandoned ways of managing water are now being recognised as climate-resilient systems that functioned for over 1,000 years – and are ready to be brought back into working use.

In recent years, India is increasingly looking to revive ancient water structures as a way to help address the country's looming water crisis. In Moosi Rani Sagar's case, it was a consortium of non-profits that set out to restore the system in 2021, hoping to combat severe water scarcity and rescue the 200-year-old heritage landmark.

Reviving India's Climate-Resilient Systems

In Alwar, the revived stepwell is a testament to the idea that some of the most useful tools for managing water in a warming, increasingly erratic climate are millennia old and half-buried in silt. The restored stepwell is a large storage tank where water is accessed through flights of steps, and it holds water at depths of up to 30ft (9m).

Vijay Sarswat, a 60-year-old Alwar resident, says it rarely drops below 20ft (6m) even in the driest months of the year. "It's just one example of what new investment can do when it engages with traditional infrastructure, rather than replacing it," said a source.

The Johad Network

In Alwar, the revival of johads – simple, crescent-shaped earthen dams that hold monsoon runoff long enough for the water to percolate into the ground – has also seen strong results in addressing the water scarcity crisis. In 1985, Rajendra Singh, an Ayurvedic medicine practitioner, arrived in Alwar planning to set up a health clinic. But when locals in Gopalpura village told him water was a more urgent problem, he began building johads instead.

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The pilot project he set up worked almost immediately: when the 1986 monsoon arrived, the restored johad filled, and within the same season, wells across Gopalpura that had been dry for years had water again.

Scaling Up

The work spread. Between 1994 and 2007, more than 10,000 water harvesting structures were put up across Alwar, restoring perennial flow to five formerly seasonal rivers and benefiting some 250 villages. The Arvari River itself, dry outside the monsoon when Singh arrived, ran through the summer of 1996 for the first time in decades.

The revived practise scaled to more than 700 villages across Rajasthan, with communities rebuilding their gram sabhas – village-level general assemblies – alongside the previously abandoned earthworks.

Source: JOY