12 Facts About Rajendra Singh

Rajendra Singh was born on 6 August 1959 and is an Indian water conservationist and environmentalist from Alwar district, Rajasthan in India.

Rajendra Singh is one of the members of the National Ganga River Basin Authority which was set up in 2009, by the Government of India as an empowered planning, financing, monitoring and coordinating authority for the Ganges, in exercise of the powers conferred under the Environment Act, 1986.

Rajendra Singh was born at village Daula in Bagpat district in Uttar Pradesh near Meerut.

Rajendra Singh's father was an agriculturist and looked over their 60 acres of land in the village and where Singh did his early schooling.

Rajendra Singh enrolled for post graduation in Hindi literature, at another college in Baraut, affiliated with Allahabad University.

Rajendra Singh became the leader of a local chapter of Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini, a student activism organisation founded by Jaiprakash Narayan, though after Jaiprakash fell ill, the internal power politics disillusioned him.

Rajendra Singh sold all his household goods for Rs 23,000 and took a bus ticket for the last stop, on boarded bus going into interior of Rajasthan, along with him were four friends from Tarun Bharat Sangha.

Rajendra Singh chided him to work with his hands rather than behaving like "educated" city folks who came, studied and then went back; later encouraged him to work on a johad, earthen check dams, which have been traditionally used to store rainwater and recharge groundwater, a technique which had been abandoned in previous decades.

Rajendra Singh started on his first padayatra through the villages of the area in 1986, educating to rebuild villages' old check dams.

Rajendra Singh has been organizing Pani Pachayat or Water Parliament in distant villages in Rajasthan to make people aware of the traditional water conservation wisdom, the urgency of groundwater recharge for maintaining underground aquifers and advocating community control over natural resources.

Rajendra Singh played a pivotal role in stopping the controversial Loharinag Pala Hydro Power Project over river Bhagirathi, the headstream of the Ganges River in 2006, even as G D Agrawal, environmentalist from IIT Kanpur went on a hunger strike.

The struggle for the life and devoted water conservation efforts of Rajendra Singh is being produced by the film producer and director Ravindra Chauhan under the name of the documentary Jal Purush Ki Kahani.