Given the enormity of India's water issues, encouraging single villages to revive and protect their own watersheds can seem a feeble response to a national crisis. But compared with controversial top-down, government-led efforts to build big dams and regulate the wanton drilling of deep wells, a careful grassroots effort to manage water locally can look both sensible and sustainable. When I visited Khandarmal with Ashok Sangle, one of the civil engineers who works for WOTR, the people there described a failed $500,000 development project to pump water several miles uphill from the nearest river. Sangle shook his head. "What is the logic of pulling water up a slope," he asked, "when you can more easily catch the rain as it flows down?"

The idea behind watershed development is simple: If people cut fewer trees, increase plant cover on the land, and build a well-planned series of dams and earthen terraces to divert and slow the downhill flow of rainwater, the soil has more time to absorb moisture. The terracingand new vegetation also control erosion, which keeps nutrient-rich topsoil from washing or blowing away, and this in turn boosts the productivity of agricultural land.

"Where the rain runs, we make it walk; where it walks, we make it crawl," explained Crispino Lobo, one of WOTR's founders, using an analogy the organization often employs when introducing the concepts behind watershed work to farmers. "Where it crawls, we make it sink into the ground." Runoff is reduced. The water table for the whole area rises, wells are less apt to go dry, and especially with some simultaneous efforts to use water more efficiently, everybody needs to worry less about when it will rain again.

The benefits—at least hypothetically—spool outward from here. More productive farmland means more food and better health for the villagers, and it opens the possibility of growing cash crops. "The first thing people do when their watershed regenerates and their income goes up," Lobo said, "is to take their kids out of the fields and put them in school."

Lobo began working on water issues in the early 1980s through a development program funded by the German government. WOTR is now directed by Marcella D'Souza, a medical doctor and Lobo's wife, whose efforts to involve women in watershed redevelopment have earned international recognition. They believe there is an important emotional dimension to watershed work as well. "If people are able to improve the land and restore the soil, you start seeing a change in how they see themselves," Lobo said. "The land reflects some hope back at them."