Jal Sahelis reviving local water management are challenging the Ken-Betwa Link Project’s controversial vision of development and water security in Bundelkhand
On the bed of the Ken River in Uttar Pradesh’s Banda district this June, farmers were growing vegetables in the exposed silt, running portable pumps into the last shrinking pools to keep the crop alive through the summer heat. A year ago, the same stretch of riverbed sat several feet underwater. Bundelkhand, the drought-prone plateau spanning 13 districts of the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, officially home to 18.3 million people, swung from a historic flood in July 2025 to a drought warning by the summer of 2026. Meteorologists now expect a strong El Niño to keep the region dry for the rest of the year.
Amid this environmental distress, the people of Bundelkhand have been in a battle against the Indian state to protect their lands and their ways of life, failing which they want fair compensation. On 5 April, thousands of villagers facing displacement by the Ken-Betwa Link Project, an ambitious river-linking project that authorities say will supply irrigation,drinking water and electricity to large swathes of Bundelkhand, gathered in protest at the construction site of the Daudhan Dam, the project’s central component. Many of them were from the Gond and Kol tribal communities, with generational ties to the land. The women staged a chita andolan by lying on mock funeral pyres, and waded into the Barna River wearing nooses to signal that the project would annihilate their communities. A farmer leader, Amit Bhatnagar, spent close to two weeks on hunger strike. Officials promised a fresh survey to decide on the compensation due to those affected. The protests paused briefly, then resumed in mid-July, before the police forcefully dispersed the demonstrators on 19 July.
Bundelkhand has long endured weather whiplash. Last year’s numbers show how extreme the swings can be. Madhya Pradesh’s Tikamgarh district, where the seasonal rainfall is normally around 268 millimetres, received 835 millimetres of rain in mid-July 2025 – a 212-percent surplus. Niwari district recorded 805 millimetres against a normal of 194 – a 315-percent surplus, the highest anywhere in Madhya Pradesh that monsoon. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) classified the rain as being in “large excess”. Down to Earth reported that more than 90 percent of fields in Tikamgarh and Niwari went unsown that season, with the little that was planted lost to waterlogging. Twelve months on, the same land is dry again, and the IMD’s own seasonal outlook links this year’s likely deficit to one of the strongest El Niño patterns on record.
It’s not just one bad year. A 2022 study in Environmental Earth Sciencesexamined rainfall from 1951 to 2018 across five Bundelkhand districts – including Madhya Pradesh’s Chhatarpur, where villages are being displaced for the Ken-Betwa Link Project – and found that the region grew markedly more drought-prone after the 1980s. That rainfall decline is projected to continue through 2050, and rain variability already exceeds 75 percent in some districts each summer and winter. A 2025 study in the Journal of Experimental Agriculture International, covering 14 districts from 1984 to 2023, found that the northern part of Bundelkhand, particularly the districts of Hamirpur and Jalaun, now faces severe drought every four to five years. Bundelkhand is not simply getting drier, it is getting less predictable – and predictability, not total rainfall, is what water infrastructure is built around.
Two very different responses to that unpredictability are now underway in Bundelkhand, situated just under 300 kilometres apart – but the distance between them in cost, in speed, and in whose consent was asked for, is enormous.
FOR MANY YEARS, government agencies have used engineering projects to tackle water shortages in Bundelkhand. After India gained independence, large dams became symbols of progress, promising irrigation, electricity and drought relief. By 1980, this had resulted in the National Perspective Plan, according to which water was to be diverted from surplus regions to regions of scarcity. This led to the Ken-Betwa Link Project, the first river-linking project in India to advance from planning to construction. The idea’s supporters argue that in areas where rainfall is variable, transferring water from one river basin to another is essential. Critics question whether the rivers once deemed water-surplus are still surplus, given that, as a result of climate change, rainfall, river flows and groundwater recharge are no longer as predictable as they were when these projects were initially conceived.
Sanjay Singh, the founder of the Bundelkhand-based nonprofit Parmarth Samaj Sevi Sansthan, was in Uttar Pradesh’s Lalitpur district in 2005, during one of the region’s recurring droughts, when he met a woman named Kunwar. She was furious. She had walked hours to fetch water, come home late, and her husband had threatened to beat her because dinner wasn’t ready. “How is this drought my fault?” she asked Singh, according to later media reports. Kunwar told him that water was the central concern of women’s lives in the area, yet women were never consulted on where to dig a well or build a channel. That conversation spawned an idea. Singh began training women, village by village, to manage water locally instead of waiting for it to arrive by government scheme. He called the participants Jal Sahelis– friends of water. Kunwar became the first one.
The model was formally launched in 2011 in 96 villages across Jalaun, Hamirpur and Lalitpur districts. According to Parmarth’s own figures and other reports, it has since grown to encompass more than 1100 active members across six districts – Jalaun, Hamirpur, Lalitpur, Jhansi, Tikamgarh and Chhatarpur – straddling both states. The work itself is unglamorous: desilting ponds choked with decades of sediment, building small check dams across seasonal streams, digging channels to catch rainwater that would otherwise run straight off the hillsides.
Two women in Madhya Pradesh’s Chhatarpur district show what this looks like in practice. Ganga Rajput was 30 years old when, in 2020, she led the revival of Baba Talaab, a 12-acre pond in her village of Chaudhary Khera. The pond had been built centuries earlier under the Chandela dynasty, but was left to silt up for roughly 40 years partly out of local superstition that disturbing it would bring misfortune. Such ponds were once common across the region: the Chandela rulers, who also built the famous Khajuraho temples, dotted Bundelkhand with tanks for irrigation and drinking water, and communities traditionally sustained them as much through custom and ritual as through engineering. In this, Bundelkhand’s ponds shared a lineage similar to many traditional ponds in India, as documented by the water conservationist Anupam Mishra in his landmark 1993 study Aaj Bhi Khare Hain Talaab (“The Ponds Still Stand Today”). Mishra spent eight years on field research, and his book became essential for NGOs working on community-based water harvesting across much of the country.
Ganga and a group of about 25 other women worked over a year to clear and restore the pond. Before they began, they performed a small ceremony to ease the community’s fears. “This year in summer, there was no shortage of water,” Ganga told Mongabay India in January 2021.
Fifteen kilometres away, in Agrotha village, 19-year-old Babita Rajput organised roughly 200 women to cut a channel 107 metres long and roughly 3.7 metres wide through a forested hillside, redirecting into the village’s 70-acre pond the monsoon runoff that had been draining into a nearby river instead. They finished the work just before India’s Covid lockdown in 2020, and during that year’s monsoon the pond filled for the first time in years.
The results of such success compound, Singh told The Quint. Villages with active Jal Saheli groups have shifted from a single rain-fed crop a year to two or three, adding wheat, gram and pulses to cropping patterns. He also said out-migration from these villages has dropped sharply since about a decade ago. The Bundelkhand Water Forum, a coalition of grassroots environmental organisations, has estimated that roughly two in five rural residents across the region left for cities over the past decade, driven mainly by water scarcity.
If community-led water-harvesting and restoration efforts have produced visible improvements across parts of Bundelkhand, why do large infrastructure projects like the Ken-Betwa Link Project continue to dominate public investment? Part of the answer lies beyond hydrology.
Large dams are highly visible symbols of state action. They come with substantial budgets, ambitious timelines and public inaugurations that signal development in ways a restored village pond rarely can. India’s water bureaucracy has also evolved around planning, constructing and managing large engineering projects, with institutions, technical expertise and funding mechanisms built for that purpose. Community restoration works differently. It does not rely on a single construction project, but depends on local participation, on a process of gradual ecological recovery and continuous maintenance. Its successes are often dispersed across villages instead of concentrated in one landmark structure. The government’s preference is not just the result of differing engineering decisions, but also a result of differing models of governing water.
The Jal Sahelis’ work has reached rivers as well as ponds. Using labour funded through India’s rural employment-guarantee scheme, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, between 2020 and 2022 Jal Sahelis and the local administration restored the 13-kilometre Barua River in Lalitpur district to year-round flow, planting some 1500 trees along its banks. None of this required a single new dam. A check dam costs between INR 2 lakh and INR 3 lakh in materials – roughly USD 2100 to USD 3100 at current exchange rates – with the labour often contributed by villagers themselves. A 2024 assessment from the Central Ground Water Board found that this kind of work improved groundwater levels in Jhansi district by two to five metres – enough that water captured in one wet season carried locals through two dry ones.
But many farmers are still sceptical about this approach. Drinking-water supply, a 60-year-old farmer named Bindrawan Lodi told the media in 2019, “remains a struggle” in some of these villages even after a pond is revived.
AROUND 300 KILOMETRES from where Ganga Rajput revived Baba Talaab, the Indian government is building the most expensive water infrastructure project in the region’s history. The Ken-Betwa Link Project, approved in December 2021 at a cost of INR 44,605 crore – almost USD 6 billion at the time – is meant to transfer surplus water from the Ken River to the drier Betwa basin through a 221-kilometre canal. Its centrepiece, the 77-metre-tall Daudhan Dam, sits inside the core zone of the Panna Tiger Reserve, which sits partly in Chhatarpur, the same district where the Jal Saheli movement has some of its deepest roots. The prime minister laid the foundation stone in December 2024; construction is underway and the government is targeting completion in 2030.
For the government, the Ken-Betwa Link Project is meant to address a long-term water imbalance rather than a single drought. The official plans have identified the Ken as a surplus basin from which water can be siphoned off to feed the Betwa basin, which is more water-stressed. According to government claims, the project will irrigate more than a million hectares, supply essential drinking water and also produce hydropower. Local water harvesting cannot provide sufficient water supply and large reservoirs are needed to hold water during times of unpredictable monsoons, its supporters say.
These claims, however, remain contested by hydrologists, environmental researchers and many affected communities, who argue that changing rainfall patterns, ecological costs and questions over the rehabilitation of affected communities complicate the project’s promise of long-term water security.
According to the Ken-Betwa Link Project Authority’s own figures, the dam will displace 5288 families in Chhatarpur district and 1400 in neighbouring Panna district, and the reservoir will submerge nearly 98 square kilometres of the reserve’s 543 square kilometres. The wildlife biologist Raghu Chundawat, who has lived in Panna district since 1995, told National Heraldthat, with this will mean the end of the reserve and also of the 55-plus tigers – as well as other animals – living in it. An account from the National Alliance for Climate and Economic Justice puts the total number of households facing displacement – including from related canal work – above 6600, with ten villages facing complete submergence and 24 affected overall.
Compensation has been the sharpest point of conflict with the affected communities. The government’s promised package runs to INR 12.5 lakh per acre and INR 6 lakh per house, but families have described being offered far less – in some cases only a token payment. Some families received as little as INR 16 or INR 200 for their homes, according to press reports. Anger against the project came to a head in April 2026 with the protests by the Gond and Kol tribal communities. Eleven days in, the district collector for Chhatarpur, Parth Jaiswal, told reporters that roughly 90 percent of affected villagers had already received compensation, and called the protesters’ remaining demands unlawful. On 16 April, after several hours of talks, the district administration agreed to a 10-day window for a fresh compensation survey, and the protest paused.
By mid-July, tribal families and farmers were back at the site, arguing that the administration’s promises had gone nowhere. Jaiswal said the state had since increased the rehabilitation package after an additional allocation of nearly INR 300 crore and added roughly 750 families to the compensation list. He also argued that most of the renewed protest came from people affected by two related irrigation projects, Majhgawan and Runjh, rather than the Ken-Betwa project itself. Protesters rejected that distinction, along with the revised compensation package.
On 19 July, the police moved in and dispersed the demonstration. Bhatnagar, then still on a hunger fast, was taken to hospital, where he told the media that he intended to continue the fight. The two sides gave conflicting accounts of what happened that morning. A police official, Aditya Patle, said no protester had been arrested or detained, and that people were simply bussed back to their villages. A protest organiser, Divya Ahirwar, said that police arrived before dawn and detained Bhatnagar and others before they could speak to the press.
The Ken-Betwa project’s paperwork has also come under fire. Himanshu Thakkar, who heads the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, has argued for years that the Detailed Project Report for the river-linking initiative shows that its primary purpose is supplying Vidisha and Raisen, Madhya Pradesh districts that are not part of Bundelkhand at all. He has declared the framing of the dam as a solution to Bundelkhand’s water issues to be “pure propaganda”, and has challenged the project at the National Green Tribunal on the grounds that its hydrological data, drawn from river-flow records three to four decades old, has never been independently reviewed against a changed climate.
Set side by side, the two approaches to mitigating water stress in Bundelkhand share almost nothing except the problem they are answering. What neither fully addresses is the volatility itself. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report found that compound hot and dry conditions are becoming more likely across nearly all land regions as global temperatures rise. The Indian government’s risk assessments applying that framework at the district level have flagged flood and drought hazards rising together across much of central India, Bundelkhand included. That matters because planning for one extreme – say, with a bigger dam to catch a bigger flood – can leave a region more exposed to the other. A pond can be desilted, a runnel redirected or a catchment expanded in a single season with local labour. A 221-kilometre canal, once built, is the same size and shape regardless of what the monsoon does the following year.
Across Southasia, governments are trying to find the right balance between large-scale infrastructure and communities’ roles in managing water as the effects of climate change grow more severe. Nepal, Sri Lanka and Pakistan offer three different versions of this same trade-off, each at its own scale. In Nepal, farmer-run water-users’ associations already manage roughly 70 percent of the country’s irrigated land, far outstripping the reach of the state-run canal systems that cover the rest. In Sri Lanka, restoration projects are reviving only a fraction of its dry zone’s ancient tank cascades; one International Fund for Agricultural Development-backed programme aims to restore 173 of the surviving tanks across six districts, out of many thousands still standing. Pakistan’s most contested water project is the Cholistan canal scheme, which plans to draw water from the Indus and Sutlej Rivers to irrigate nearly two million hectares of what is currently desert land. A stay order from the Sindh High Court and a provincial resolution have held up construction since April 2025, and the matter remains before the courts.
Neither a pond nor a dam can fully solve the problem on its own. But for now, in Bundelkhand, the smaller and much cheaper solution is the only one that has already shown any success, and it has worked for 15 years and counting.
First Published by Himal Mag on 18 August 2026.