It was 1991, and Om Prakash Sharma, now Director at Water Wisdom Foundation and a civil engineer with 36 years of experience working on water issues in the drylands of India, had just arrived in the Sambhar Salt Lake region of Rajasthan for a water harvesting project. The underground water there was saline, nearly undrinkable. One evening, instead of forcing down the hard, bitter water, he and his team ate kheer, rice pudding, just to get some liquid into their bodies.
That moment stayed with him for decades.
“I learned what it meant to remain thirsty rather than drink the hard, salty water,” he recalls. “At times, we even ate kheer as a substitute for sweet water.”
It was a small, almost absurd inconvenience for a visiting engineer. For the villagers around him, it was simply Tuesday. That contrast, between what the city takes for granted and what the village fights for every day.
From Urban Engineer to Rural Water Advocate
Sharma grew up in an urban environment and studied civil engineering. In the early 1990s, while looking for work, he came across AFPRO, Action for Food Production, a national NGO that provided free technical services to grassroots organizations. It was his first real encounter with the voluntary sector.
“My work exposed me to rural and village life, where I witnessed stark realities that deeply unsettled me,” he says. “I realized how many things we city dwellers take for granted, clean water, reliable electricity, basic infrastructure, are considered luxuries in villages.”
That first assignment in Sambhar taught him something else too: that simple, community-managed solutions often work best. Catching rain where it falls, building ponds, constructing small masonry dams, harvesting water from rooftops into tanks. These were not complicated technologies. But they were effective, local, and repairable.
Building Systems, Visiting Villages
In 2000, Sharma moved to Wells for India, UK, now known as WaterHarvest, where he headed the India office and built systems to fund water harvesting projects across Rajasthan and Gujarat. Between 2000 and 2024, he visited nearly all of the approximately 2,600 villages that the organization supported.
That is not a number he mentions casually. Each of those villages was a classroom.
He worked across the dryland regions of Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Madhya Pradesh, areas where water scarcity is not a crisis that arrives occasionally but a condition that shapes everything: how families eat, how children grow up, how women spend their days.
In 2025, he joined Water Wisdom Foundation as a Director, continuing the work he has devoted his career to. The Foundation was established in 2017, inspired by the legacy of Wells for India and WaterHarvest. It works on training, documentation, and research support for NGOs, corporates, academic institutions, and government bodies and implements water projects that can serve as models for others. It currently operates in the dryland regions of Rajasthan and Gujarat.
What Water Scarcity Actually Looks Like
Ask Sharma what water scarcity means in practice, and he does not reach for statistics first. He tells you about women.
“Women spend countless hours fetching water, leaving them with little time for household chores or income-generating activities,” he says. “The burden often falls on the girl child, who must assist her mother in carrying water, sometimes walking 2 to 5 kilometres from home, which keeps her away from school.” The cycle embeds itself early. A girl who misses school to carry water is a girl whose opportunities narrow before they have even begun.
The communities worst affected are also the most marginalised. Sharma shares the story of a woman from the outskirts of a village in Rajasthan who belongs to a lower caste. Her family lives on the margins, literally and socially.
“Every day, we must walk more than 3 to 4 km to fetch water from a source that is specially designated for families like ours. To bring enough water for the household, we have to make four to five trips. No one has ever made a serious effort to solve our problems.”
Then there is Sushila Devi from Sunadiya village in Jaipur district. A Dalit woman, she used to fetch water from handpumps and a community tank, sometimes walking to a pump near a canal when the tank ran dry. One handpump had contaminated water that caused stomach problems. Each round trip took about an hour and she made two trips a day.
Now, a rooftop rainwater harvesting tank has been built at her home. She helped dig the pit herself, did masonry work, and contributed three bags of cement. The tank is locked to keep the water clean, and water is drawn through a handpump and filtered before drinking.
“This water tastes sweet and pleasant,” she says, “unlike the previously bitter and salty sources.”
She no longer leaves home to fetch water.
The Hardest Part Is Not the Engineering
After 36 years, Sharma is clear about what makes or breaks a project. It is not a technical design. It is community ownership.
“Even when projects are successfully implemented, ensuring that structures are regularly cleaned, repaired, and managed by local stakeholders is difficult,” he tells The Logical Indian. “Without strong ownership, systems fall into disrepair, and the impact diminishes over time.”
He has seen well-designed structures become unused because communities were not involved in building them. He has seen projects fail when funding was delayed and trust wore thin. And he has learned that when things go wrong, the answer is not to fix the design. It is to fix the relationship.
“The projects that did not succeed as planned reinforced the principle that water conservation is as much about relationships as it is about engineering.”
Climate variability has added new complexity. Erratic rainfall means that even a good structure can sit dry for a season, frustrating the very communities it was meant to help. Sharma says the response has to be honest communication and adaptive design, not promises of certainty.
Blending Old Wisdom with New Technology
Sharma’s core expertise, built over nearly four decades, lies in finding the meeting point between traditional water harvesting wisdom and modern technology. He does not see them as opposites. He sees them as partners, provided the balance is right.
Traditional systems like kunds, baoris, johads, and tankas were decentralized, community-managed, and designed to work with local climatic conditions. Modern technology can enhance their efficiency through better materials, improved storage designs, and integration with piped supply networks. But Sharma is careful about the order in which these things are introduced.
“Reviving indigenous water harvesting is not just about conservation,” he says. “It is about restoring a cultural relationship with water. When communities see these systems as part of their heritage and pride, they are more likely to maintain them, celebrate them, and pass them on to future generations.”
In the Sambhar Salt Lake region, where his journey began, Sharma and the Foundation now promote rooftop rainwater harvesting systems that are maintained carefully and designed to look beautiful. The intention is deliberate. When a structure is something a family takes pride in, they are more likely to clean it, repair it, and protect it.
“Such practices help families build a deeper connection with water, seeing it not only as a necessity but as an important and cherished element of their lives,” he explains.
He also points to the broader case for small-scale, locally managed solutions. “By embracing small-scale, local solutions, we can alleviate the pressure on government piped water systems, ultimately contributing to our collective goal of ensuring every family has access to safer, potable drinking water.”
What Traditional Wisdom Still Has to Teach Us
Sharma is an engineer who has spent decades arguing that engineering alone is not enough. He points to Rajasthan’s indigenous water systems as proof that centuries-old solutions still hold answers. His concern is that this traditional knowledge is eroding. Where water bodies were once treated as sacred, they are now often treated as commodities. He sees this as a governance problem, not just a cultural one.
“Communities must regard ponds, rivers, and tanks as sacred, and misuse must be socially unacceptable,” he says. “Conservation has to be a natural practice.”
He is also direct about the limits of technology when it is applied without cultural grounding. The belief that pollution or scarcity can simply be fixed by technical solutions reflects, in his view, a dangerous detachment from the deeper relationship humans have historically had with water. “Technology is valuable, but without respect and restraint, it risks becoming a band-aid rather than a solution.”
Reintegrating cultural reverence with modern innovations, he says, is the only path that holds. Rainwater harvesting, aquifer recharge, and decentralized storage systems must evolve with climate realities, but they should also be rooted in values of respect and responsibility.
A Crisis That Is Only Getting Worse
Sharma does not shy away from describing where India’s water situation is headed. Rainfall patterns have become increasingly unpredictable, with some regions facing prolonged droughts while others deal with devastating floods. The traditional reliance on monsoon cycles is no longer sufficient.
Groundwater depletion adds urgency. Over-extraction for irrigation has left aquifers dangerously low, particularly in states like Punjab, Haryana, and Rajasthan. As demand rises with population growth, the gap between supply and availability keeps widening. This threatens food security, public health, and social equity.
The solutions he advocates are both immediate and structural. Climate-resilient agriculture is critical, shifting away from water-intensive crops toward millets and pulses, and adopting micro-irrigation to reduce wastage. Integrated river basin management can help balance water use across regions. Wastewater treatment and reuse can ease pressure on freshwater sources. And small-scale locally managed water harvesting, he says, is not a stopgap. It is a significant step toward climate adaptation.
“Water governance today requires more than infrastructure,” he tells The Logical Indian. “It requires a narrative shift. By reframing water not just as a resource but as a vital element of survival and identity, communities can rebuild their relationship with it.”
Listening First, Teaching Later
Sharma’s most recent publication is “Wise Water Solutions in Rajasthan,” which draws on his decades of field experience to document what has worked, what has not, and why. He has presented at national and international conferences on water issues. But he remains careful about the word “expert.”
“I do not call myself a water expert,” he says. “What I have learned over the years, especially from working with dryland communities in Rajasthan and Gujarat, is that they are among the best managers of life in all its aspects. My hope is that we learn from them rather than preach to them.”
He has a consistent critique of outsider-led interventions. Too often, organisations arrive with solutions before they have understood the problem. Technologies are introduced without regard for whether communities can maintain them. And the results, however impressive at launch, do not last.
“Dryland communities have endured water shortages for generations, and in response they have developed ingenious ideas and practices. The real challenge for us is to listen and learn from them first.”
For those who want to work in this space, his message is plain. Respect the community. Build relationships before you build structures. And stay long enough to see what happens after the inauguration.
A Life That Grew Into Its Purpose
Looking back, Sharma reflects that he did not begin this work with any grand sense of purpose. He was looking for a job.
“We must step beyond the idea of a job and embrace what we do with our heart,” he says. “When passion and purpose guide our actions, the work gradually becomes part of our character and daily life.”
Over 36 years, across three organisations and thousands of villages, that is exactly what happened. The engineer who once ate kheer because the water was too bitter to drink became someone who has spent his life making sure others do not have to.
The work continues. The villages, he says, still have more to teach.
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
In a country where nearly 163 million people still lack access to clean water close to home, the answers are rarely found in policy documents or boardrooms.
Sometimes they are found in a bowl of kheer eaten in a drought-prone village in Rajasthan, by an engineer who was paying attention. In your city, in your home, how much water did you use today without thinking about it?
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