Many young people in India are moving to the cities, but Ramveer Tanwar did the exact opposite — he gave up his plush job in a multinational company to stay rooted in his village life.
Siting at ease with his parents on a cot made with jute and wood, he said his happiest memory was learning to swim with the buffaloes in the village ponds.
"I would hold on to buffaloes' tails and learn how to paddle in the waters," he said with a smile.
"Right after school, my responsibility in our farmer family was to take the buffaloes for a dip in the local pond. Cattle need that to cool their body temperatures in the tropical heat, as it boosts their milk production."
But the smile fades away. The same pond is now a garbage dumping site.
Natural wetlands on the decline
30-year-old Ramveer grew up in a village named Dadha, just outside New Delhi.
As the city expanded, tall buildings and apartments started taking over neighbouring farmlands to form what is now known as the "National Capital Region", or NCR.
NCR comprises many cities on the outskirts of Delhi, which are a hub for multi-national companies like Google, Microsoft, Accenture and many media houses, with a workforce of hundreds of thousands of people from all over the country.
With rapid urbanisation in the early 2000s, pollution, urban waste and depleting groundwater started choking the ponds and wetlands that surrounded the national capital.
"In Noida, which is one of the NCR cities just adjacent to my village, there used to be 600 ponds that used to recharge groundwater levels and maintain the water cycle," Ramveer said.
"But now, there are hardly 10 ponds that are left. Most ponds are either buried under huge garbage mounds or have become landfill sites."
As per reports, India has lost 30 per cent of its natural wetlands over the last three decades.
Ramveer first noticed it when he was a young student, on his way back from school, which used to be a long journey of 30 kilometres.
"I saw first-hand how the ponds which taught me swimming and gave relief to our cattle from the heat were dying," he said.
"That was the moment it struck me that something needed to be done. But I didn't know what exactly it would take to save them."
Battling pollution and stereotypes
Ramveer was the first in the family to have graduated from college and felt the pressure of parental expectations.
Having studied engineering, he joined the multinational company Cyeint Ltd. His parents were proud.
Little did he know that the career move would become the stepping-stone for him to return to his true calling – the restoration of the ponds.
"I used to find ways to restore the ponds during the weekends, while my office colleagues would spend their weekend partying in clubs," he said.
"I used to hold 'water meetings' in the villages to raise awareness about the ponds and the importance of their preservation. But it was hard to juggle passion and profession. Even my colleagues could sense that my heart was somewhere else. This struggle went on for two years and finally, I quit my job in 2018."
The job of cleaning is considered lowly or undignified in India. It's usually reserved for the poor and uneducated who don't have qualifications for white-collar work.
Worried about how his parents would react when they learned he had left his respectable job to clean ponds, he pretended to go to work every day for two months, instead attending events and seminars in Delhi on water conservation or sustainable living.
He knew his family would find out sooner or later when the financial crisis would hit home. But he managed to convince his father to allow him a couple of years to follow his passion, after which he promised he would get into a regular job.
Becoming the pondman
With a reluctant nod from his father, Ramveer set out on his mission. He formed a small team of volunteers and divers who were experts in cleaning the garbage on the surface and tackling slush in deep waters, often infested with snakes, scorpions, and bacteria.
The team identified ponds around Delhi that needed restoration and started cleaning them in stages.
His team's work soon started getting noticed and money from CSR (Corporate Social responsibility) initiatives from various companies started coming in, helping him expand his work to other cities.
"In 2021, the Prime Minister mentioned my name in his national radio address as an example for the youth and called me the 'pondman'," Ramveer said.
"Gradually people and the media started calling me the 'Pondman of India'. The people who were once criticising me and making fun of me for doing a so-called lowly job started praising me. They started respecting me after the Prime Minister's address. And with that, my family started to have faith in my calling."
Nearly 200,000 people die in India every year due to inadequate access to safe water, and according to the World Bank, India has 18 per cent of the world's population but only 4 per cent of its water resources, making it among the most water-stressed countries in the world.
A government report says that about 40 per cent of the Indian population may face water stress by 2030.
"These are really shocking numbers. People need to realise the importance of old techniques to save water and get back to our ancestral ways of conservation," Ramveer said.
"Ground water recharging will be instrumental in coming days and years as the planet gets hotter and access to water becomes a global problem."
'An army of pondmen'
So far, Ramveer and his team have restored 80 ponds in six states in India.
But the work is not as simple as it sounds. Ramveer says the biggest challenge often comes from the villagers, who are not easily convinced about the importance of restoring the ponds.
His solution was to appoint a pondman in each village, giving them the responsibility of taking care of the restored pond.
"We can restore a pond, but it's the villagers who have to look after the water body in future and save it from becoming a landfill site again.
"I aim to create an army of pondmen across India, which ultimately outnumbers the people who throw garbage in the water bodies."
Showing me around a pristine, restored pond in a nearby village, Ramveer said he finds immense joy in seeing children enjoying boating in the ponds and aquatic birds coming back to their natural habitat.
"This feeling of satisfaction is out of this world," he said with a smile.