Here's How Farmers Plan to Make the Monsoon Last All Year

Prem Singh Khinchi, 78, walks with habitual ease over wet, lumpy soil to stand on the edge of his farm in central India and survey his soybean saplings. He gestures with a satisfied smile toward his man-made pond as big as an Olympic pool and declares that the monsoon rainwater he’s collected on his previously parched land will last him a year.

“We’ll have more than enough water,” says Khinchi. He and another farmer were among the first to dig irrigation ponds a decade ago at the behest of a district official who came up with the idea. As Khinchi reaped three crops a year from his irrigated farm instead of two and boosted his income three times over, imitators followed, digging more than 4,000 rain-collection holes in the Dewas district of the state of Madhya Pradesh alone, where water trains used to have to carry in vital river water from far away. "You can look around and see what a difference our farm ponds have made to our lives, our incomes and our fields," Khinchi says.