Laxman Singh is creating innovative water conservation and natural resource management systems in drought-prone districts of Rajasthan state in western India. His techniques create wide-ranging benefits for village residents, including better living standards, education, and health. Singh focuses on training youth to imbibe local wisdom and implement indigenous blueprints of democratic water management. Beginning 20 years ago in the remote and tiny village of Laporiya, Singh's Gram Vikas Navyuvak Mandal Laporiya's (GVNML) organization has spread its beneficial influence more than 172 villages, affecting 42,550 families, or some 335,500 persons.

The result is a scientific model of natural resource management that has revived dwindling crop yields, "regreened" communities, and arrested the out-migration of people and cattle. Singh has replaced ineffective centralized government planning with local self-reliance and pride. "Like a survival skill, water conservation techniques have traveled down generations in Rajasthan," he said. "Therefore, what we need today are not experts from outside, but awakening the expertise within." Because livestock are a mainstay of the rural economy, Singh's water management techniques emphasize regenerating denuded pasturelands.