The Economics We Don't Study PART 1: Case Studies from Villages of Jaisalmer (Socio Economic Survey)

Ramesh Beniwal | Field Researcher, Sambhaav Trust

There is a moment, somewhere between your third cup of chai made from fresh sheep's milk and your fifth conversation about groundwater levels, when you stop being a researcher and start being a student.

That moment came for me somewhere in the Thar Desert of Rajasthan, in a small village called Ekalpaar, when a farmer named Gaji Ram looked at the sky after two days of continuous rainfall and smiled the way people smile when something they have been waiting for their whole life finally arrives.

"Bhagwan ki kripa se is saal sab achha hoga," he said. With God's blessings, this year everything will be good.

I had been in Jaisalmer for less than a week at that point, working with Sambhaav Trust — a grassroots organization quietly rebuilding the ancient water harvesting structures of Rajasthan called Khadins. I thought I understood what I was there to study. I was wrong. What I was actually there to learn had very little to do with water management and everything to do with what it means to build a life in a place where the sky decides everything.

What Is a Khadin — And Why Does It Matter?

Before I go any further, let me explain what a Khadin is — because without understanding this, the rest of the story makes little sense.

A Khadin is one of the oldest water harvesting systems in the world, originating in Rajasthan hundreds of years ago. In simple terms, it is a large piece of land surrounded by an earthen embankment — a Dhora — built in a triangular shape that catches and stores rainwater flowing in from the surrounding terrain. The water sits in the Khadin for weeks, sometimes months, slowly soaking into the soil and creating enough moisture for farmers to grow crops even in one of the driest regions on earth.

There is no pump. No canal. No electricity required. Just the rain, the land, and the knowledge of how to hold them together.

Sambhaav Trust, working directly with farmers, helping them reconstruct broken Dhoras, build drainage channels called Naalas, and install water control spillways called Chadars. The goal is simple and profound at the same time: give water back to people who have survived without enough of it for generations.

Over two weeks, I visited nearly 20 villages and met over 50 farmers, shepherds, and families. This is what I found.

The Economy Nobody Talks About

On my first day of serious fieldwork, I visited a farmer named Khet Singh Ji in Nethasi village. He has 36 bighas of land, 150 sheep, 50 goats, and a Khadin that is 48 years old. In a good year, his farm income reaches ₹7 lakh.

But what struck me was not the number. It was something he said almost in passing — that when he sells guar or mustard to the market, he gets a low price. When he buys anything from the market, he pays a high price. The gap between what a farmer earns and what a farmer spends is one of the most consistent and painful features of rural life in Rajasthan, and I heard some version of this observation in almost every village I visited.

This is the economy nobody in the cities talks about. It is not dramatic. It does not make headlines. But it shapes every decision these farmers make — whether to sow this season or skip it, whether to sell the animals or hold on, whether to let the son go to school or keep him on the farm.

What the Khadin does — quietly, without announcement — is shift this equation slightly in the farmer's favour. With more water, more crops become possible. With more crops, the farmer has more to sell, more to store, and more to bargain with. A Khadin is not just a water structure. It is an economic intervention dressed in mud and stone.

The People Who Stayed

In village after village, I heard the same story told in different ways. Before the Khadin was built, people left. They went to road construction sites in border areas. They broke stones in army bases. They filled potholes on highways for ₹500 a day when work was available — which was not often.

Moolaram Ji from Dabla Par told me that before his Khadin was built, there were times when the family could not afford food. He borrowed money constantly. Financial insecurity was not an occasional visitor — it was a permanent resident.

Today, his annual income from farming is ₹3 to 4 lakh. His son Manohar Ram's productivity has tripled since the Khadin was rebuilt. Manohar Ram wakes up every morning when the birds start singing — he does not need an alarm clock — and on the morning after a rainfall, he runs to his field before sunrise to see how much water has collected.

That image — a man running to his field at dawn after rain — is the image I keep coming back to when I try to explain what this work is really about.

Water Is Political

Jaisalmer has already taught me more than I expected, and with over a month remaining in the field, I feel that I am only beginning to understand its people, landscapes, and realities. One of the most surprising was that water is never just water. It is power. It is identity. It is politics.

In Rupsi village, a young farmer named Anupa Ram Ji — just 23 years old — told me that his family's Khadin once had a Chadar built on it, a stone spillway that controlled how far the water flowed. Then, during a local election, his uncle was a candidate. The Rajput community in the area demanded that water from the Chadar should reach their fields downstream. To satisfy this demand, the Chadar was removed.

One stone structure. One election promise. One family's water security traded for votes.

This is not an unusual story. Across the villages I visited, I found that water sources — ponds, Beris, Khadins, canals — are embedded in webs of caste, community, and political power that outsiders rarely see. Who gets water, how much, when, and from where — these are never purely technical questions. They are social ones.

What 70 Years of Wages Looks Like

In Sonaram Ki Dhani, I met Indira Devi — 70 years old, still cutting grass in the fields every day, still spending her evenings with her goats because, as she said, being around them feels like home.

She has worked at a power station, at the TV tower (One of the tallest TV tower in the country) in Ramgarh, and on road construction sites. At the power station, she earned ₹2.50 to ₹3 per day. On the roads, she earned ₹1.50 per day. Once, she worked for 8 annas — half a rupee — for a full day's labour.

She was not bitter when she told me this. She was just telling me how things were.

Then she said something that I have been thinking about ever since. She said that in those days, life was simpler because inflation was low. Today, income has gone up — but the real value of money has fallen so much that nothing feels easier. "Pehle kam mein kaam chal jaata tha. Ab zyada mein bhi poora nahi hota." Before, less was enough. Now, more is still not enough.

This is what economists call the inflation trap. Indira Devi called it life.

The Farmer Who Plants Trees for Grandchildren He Has Not Met Yet

In Tejwa, I met Taar Singh Ji — 36 years old, with 20 cows, 15 goats, 20 sheep, 6 children, and a Khadin that is 70 years old and falling apart. He drinks water from tankers that cost ₹1,000 each and last 10 days. Drinkable groundwater on his land is at 980 feet — nearly 300 metres below the surface.

And yet, on his farm, he has planted 100 to 200 small trees over the past 2 to 3 years. Some of them bore fruit this season for the first time.

When I asked him why — why plant trees when you barely have water to survive — he looked at me as if the question did not quite make sense. He said simply that if farming becomes difficult in the future, the trees will still give something. He is not planting for himself. He is planting for whoever comes after him.

There is also a local goddess temple in Tejwa, and because of the community's faith, no one is allowed to cut any tree in the village — not for money, not for any reason. Only small branches can be taken, and only for weddings. The full tree is sacred.

This one religious rule has preserved the natural environment of Tejwa in a way that no government forest department has managed anywhere nearby. Sometimes, I thought, the most effective conservation policy is not a policy at all. It is a story told with enough reverence that people choose to follow it without being forced to.

The Generation That Is Getting Weaker

One conversation that I could not shake came from an older farmer in Netasi village, during the session with agricultural scientist Dr. Bablu Singh. The farmers sitting around him — some in their 60s and 70s — said something that stopped me cold.

They said that with every new generation, people are becoming physically weaker. There is approximately a 5-year gap between each generation, and in each gap, the strength, endurance, and health of people visibly declines.

Their explanation was simple. Earlier, people ate food they grew themselves — pure, chemical-free, seasonal, local. They worked hard in the fields. They drank clean well water. They ate once a day and had enough energy for the whole day. Today, people eat market food with pesticides, work less physically, and spend more money — and yet they are sicker, weaker, and less happy.

This is not nostalgia. The same farmers who told me this also acknowledged that the tractor is better than the bullock in terms of efficiency. They were not asking to go backwards. They were pointing at something real — that somewhere in the transaction of becoming modern, something important was quietly lost.

Dr. Singh himself reinforced this when he told the farmers that the Khadin belt of Jaisalmer is one of the finest regions in India for organic farming. The irony is that many farmers sitting in that meeting did not know this about their own land.

The Old Economy and the New One

Gajuram Ji from Barkattala — a shepherd who has been grazing sheep for 45 years — told me about the time before mobile phones, before weather forecasts, before paved roads. When rainfall was scarce in Jaisalmer, shepherds would simply pack up their animals and walk — sometimes all the way to Haryana or Punjab — following whatever rumours they had heard about rain and green fields.

When they arrived at a farm, the local farmer would not charge them. He would welcome them. Because the dung from hundreds of grazing animals naturally fertilized the soil. The shepherd's animals got food. The farmer's land got manure. No money changed hands. No contract was signed. It worked because both sides needed each other.

That economy is largely gone now. The tractor replaced the bullock. The market replaced the barter. The city replaced the village as the place where wealth flows. And the money that once circulated within a community — keeping everyone just barely afloat — began flowing outward, into fuel companies, seed companies, fertilizer companies, middlemen.

"Pehle gaon ka paisa gaon mein rehta tha," one farmer told me. Before, the village's money stayed in the village.

It doesn't anymore.

The Four Things That Make a Khadin Possible

One evening, sitting with Chatar Singh Ji after a long day in the field, I asked him how Sambhaav Trust decides where to build a Khadin. He thought for a moment and then said there are four things they look for.

Land — the right topography and soil to hold water naturally.

Water flow — a natural catchment from which rainwater will actually reach the site.

Poverty — the family must genuinely need this support. The Khadin is built for those who have no other option.

Willingness — and this, he said, is the most important. The family must want to work. They must be willing to maintain the structure, plant the crops, put in the effort season after season. Because without this inner willingness, even the best-built Khadin goes to waste.

I have been thinking about that fourth condition ever since. It is not something you can build. It is not something you can fund. It is something you have to find — in people who have not yet given up, in families who still believe that the effort is worth making even when the rains have failed twice in a row.

Sambhaav Trust finds those people. And then it builds them a Khadin.

What a Dry Pond Teaches Us

On one of my last few days in the field, I walked into a completely dry pond near Tejwa with Taar Singh Ji. The cracked mud stretched in all directions. The water was completely gone.

And standing in the middle of that dry pond were a few cows. Just standing there. Not grazing — there was nothing to graze. Not drinking — there was nothing to drink. Just standing, in the place where water used to be.

I do not know exactly what I felt in that moment. Something between sadness and respect. These animals did not understand drought as a concept. They just knew that this was the place where water had been before, and so they came here, and they waited.

People in Jaisalmer do something very similar. They build structures to hold the water. They repair them when they break. They plant seeds when the rains come and guard their fields through the night when wild boars threaten to eat the harvest. They send their children to school while still bringing them back during harvest season to help with the work. They borrow money at 3 percent monthly interest, repay it when the crop is good, and start again when it is not.

They wait. They work. They hope.

And every year, they look at the sky the way Gaji Ram looked at it that morning in Ekalpaar — with the particular faith of someone who has been disappointed before and is choosing to hope anyway.

What Jaisalmer Is Teaching Me

I came to Jaisalmer as a field researcher. A few weeks into this journey, I find myself becoming something harder to define.

So far, I have learned that a Khadin is not merely a water-harvesting structure. It can be the difference between a family that eats and a family that struggles to. It can be the difference between a farmer who remains on his land and one who is forced to leave in search of work elsewhere. In many ways, it is the difference between a village that survives and one that slowly fades away.

I have learned that the most important economic unit in rural Rajasthan is often not the rupee—it is water. Everything else flows from it. Crops, livestock, health, income, education, and dignity all depend on whether the rains arrive and whether there is a system capable of capturing and storing that gift when it does.

I have learned that some of the most valuable knowledge in the Thar Desert is not found in universities or policy documents. It lives in the experience of a seventy-year-old woman cutting grass in her field. It exists in traditional seed-preservation techniques using neem leaves and sand, in the cooperative arrangements of families sharing a Khadin, and in the foresight of farmers planting trees for generations they may never see.

I have also learned that meaningful rural development is often quiet work. It happens village by village, family by family, season by season. The work being carried out by Sambhaav Trust is not designed for headlines. It does not seek attention. Yet its impact can be seen in restored livelihoods, improved water security, and renewed hope.

Most importantly, I have learned how much I still do not know.

I am still in the field, and I still have several months ahead of me in Jaisalmer. There are more villages to visit, more stories to listen to, and more lessons waiting beyond the next sandy track. What I have written here is not a conclusion but a beginning—a snapshot of what these first weeks have revealed.

For now, the journey continues.

And somewhere ahead, another farmer is looking at the sky, waiting for rain, and carrying a lesson I have yet to learn.

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