Amreli and Gir Somnath sit on the Arabian Sea coast, where salinity creeps inland as groundwater is drawn down and cyclones make landfall. We build the structures that hold rain where it falls, restore tree cover, and train the volunteers who respond in the first hour when a storm hits.
Everything else in this region is downstream of water. Crop choice, income, whether a family stays through the summer, whether a girl finishes school or spends her mornings walking to a hand pump. As groundwater is pulled out faster than it recharges, seawater moves inland through the aquifer. The wells do not run dry so much as turn brackish — which is worse. The water is still there, but it kills the crop and corrodes the pump. So the work has two aims at once: hold more rain on the surface, and push more of it back into the ground before it reaches the sea.
Farm ponds, field bunds and check dam deepening. Deepening an existing check dam is unglamorous and cheap next to building a new one, and it is usually the higher-return choice.
Plantation run as a programme with survival tracked, not a photo opportunity. We push hardest on field margins — a tree on a bund shades soil, holds the bank and belongs to a farmer with a reason to keep it alive.
Village volunteers trained for the first hour after a cyclone, and disaster risk written into the Gram Panchayat's own development plan so the preparation outlives any individual volunteer.
Amreli, Gir Somnath and Rajkot districts. Figures to March 2025.
A number on its own is not an outcome. Each one below says what it actually altered, and where it comes from.
+5.73 ft
average rise in the groundwater table across the Rajkot project villages
Twenty-six check dams renovated and roughly 10 lakh cubic metres of storage created across 139 villages of Gondal, Kotda Sangani and Jasdan. A well that refills is the only measure that matters here — irrigated area per farm rose from 12.41 to 16.02 bigha off the back of it.
SSKK Annual Report 2025-26
261
open and bore wells recharged
A recharged well is the difference between a pump that lifts water and one that lifts brine. Recharge pushes back against the salt front rather than waiting for the aquifer to fail.
SSKK programme records, to March 2025
444 acres
brought under irrigation
Land that could only take one rain-fed crop can now carry a second. That is a change in what a household earns across a whole year, not a one-off transfer.
SSKK programme records, to March 2025
50
farm ponds in Gir Somnath, built with CSPC and Tata Trusts
About 1,80,000 cubic metres held over a monsoon — water for the last irrigation in a year when the rain stops early.
SSKK Annual Report 2022-23
94%
survival rate of the trees planted in 2024-25, checked a year on
Planting is easy to count. Survival is the number that decides whether there is tree cover in ten years. Through the cotton programme alone, 79,914 have gone in since 2021-22 — 20,684 then 16,740 then 19,624 then 22,866 — and they are counted again the following season.
SSKK Better Cotton monthly report, March 2025
30
Suraksha Sathi volunteers trained after Cyclone Tauktae
Trained neighbours reach a collapsed house before any agency does. The final training module writes disaster risk into the Gram Panchayat Development Plan, so a volunteer who moves away takes the training with them but the evacuation route stays.
Training with Unnati and UNICEF, Inter-Agency Group
We count structures, storage volume and wells recharged, and those we can stand behind. What we have not done is measure the water table across the intervention villages over time against comparable villages without it — the measurement that would actually prove salinity is being held back. It is the honest gap in this programme.
Farm ponds — 133 built, 4.09 million cubic feet of storage, 467 acres covered for recharge and supplementary irrigation. A farm pond is the smallest useful unit of water infrastructure: one farmer, one monsoon’s insurance, and a recharge point for every well within a few hundred metres.
Field bunds — 120 hectares, protecting 111 farmers’ land. Bunds slow runoff so water soaks in instead of carrying topsoil away.
Check dam deepening — 1.21 million cubic feet of added storage, 185 acres irrigated for 158 farmers, 182 wells recharged.
In Rajkot district we repaired 73 community water harvesting structures, adding roughly 20.2 lakh cubic metres of capacity, and did drinking water work in 24 villages.
Two small lines of work that matter more than their budgets suggest: 100 green cook stoves, cutting indoor smoke in kitchens where women spend hours a day; and 30 biochar demonstrations, turning crop residue that would otherwise be burnt into a soil amendment that holds water and carbon.
2,520 hectares brought under climate-adaptive practice, 2,550 households supported to diversify food production, 314 soil micronutrient tests.
The point is not any single structure. A village that has planned for erratic rainfall — and has the Panchayat resolutions, the structures and the cropping changes to show for it — meets a bad year differently from one that has not.
What the numbers above look like from inside a single household.
Bhadva, Kotda Sangani, Rajkot
Bhadva rebuilt its own water, sanitation and enterprise base — and took first rank for cleanliness in Rajkot district while doing it.
Read the story
Derdi Kumbhaji, Rajkot
Derdi Kumbhaji looked at a barren plot nobody was using and decided to plant it. The saplings have doubled in height since.
Read the story
Helping 30,000 farmers cut input costs, repair their soil and stay solvent through bad years.
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3,000 women trained in a trade, and the groups, credit and confidence to actually use it.
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Screening camps that find cancers early, in villages where women rarely see a specialist.
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