Kiran Rao

Kiran Rao is a Hindi-cinema filmmaker, director of Dhobi Ghat and Laapataa Ladies, who in 2016 was one of the founders of the Paani Foundation, a Maharashtra water conservation organisation. She was not its sole founder: it was set up by Rao with the actor Aamir Khan, Reena Dutta and the director Satyajit Bhatkal, who became its chief executive.

The foundation came out of the television series Satyamev Jayate, which Khan presented and Bhatkal directed, and which had devoted an episode in July 2012 to water scarcity and the failures of water management. When the series ended in November 2014 the team decided to take up one problem and stay with it, choosing chronic water shortage in rural Maharashtra, where a third of the state is semi-arid, irrigation covers a small fraction of cultivated land and groundwater has been drawn down by borewells. Rao and the others spent more than a year studying the problem and possible remedies before registering the foundation in 2016, the year a train had to be commissioned to carry water to Latur.

Paani Foundation's method is to teach rather than to fund. Its central programme, the Satyamev Jayate Water Cup, trains a handful of villagers from each participating village in watershed development and social leadership, then sets villages to compete over roughly 45 weeks-to-monsoon days to create the greatest rainwater storage capacity, largely through shramdaan or voluntary labour; the foundation supplies training but not money for the works. The first contest in 2016 covered 116 villages in three talukas; by 2018 it ran across 4,032 villages in 75 drought-hit tehsils in Marathwada, Vidarbha, north and western Maharashtra. The 2016 and 2017 rounds together created about 100 billion litres of additional storage capacity. Rao also recorded the Marathi Water Cup anthem, Toofan Aalaya.[2][3]