This book describes various studies done on the eastern, northern and southern parts of India in the field of water management practices and techniques, but literature on central and western India is scarce. Located in central India, Bundelkhand has unique geography, political history and water technologies. Tracing the water history in a drought-prone region like Bundelkhand is crucial for unravelling the complex roots of these causes and various variables, which often transcend mere technical understandings of water. The pioneering work of Waterman Rajendra Singh in the Alwar district of Rajasthan exemplifies how traditional techniques remain highly relevant for water conservation in the contemporary era. Understanding the intricate interplay between water and society across long-term temporal trajectories is essential for uncovering and comprehending the acute environmental and social consequences of large-scale interventions. Paying heed to ‘epistemology of particulars’ and within a long-temporal scale of pre- colonial and colonial conjectures, this study will trace water technologies in pre-colonial Bundelkhand and identify whether the colonial period was watershed in terms of environmental equations and social relations. The present study will contribute to the field of historiography of water in the central region because every region or part is different from another due to different geomorphology and political interventions.

Dr. Saurabh Sharma has completed his PhD from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. He was awarded Junior Research Fellowship by MHRD, Govt. of India for his Master and Institute fellowship for his PhD by IIT Kharagpur. Additionally, the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute selected him for the Shastri Research Student Fellowship (SRSF) 2019–20. He has published in reputed journals such as Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, Parts A/B/C, Indian Journal of History of Science, Frontiers in Education, etc. His research focuses on addressing the acute water crisis in Bundelkhand, Central India, using hydro-social and other social science frameworks, which speak to water and society relationships, and proposes an eco-friendly solution contrary to big hydrological interventions.

Dr. Jenia Mukherjee is an Associate Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. She specializes in water history and transdisciplinary hydrosocial research. Her monograph Blue Infrastructures (Springer Nature 2020) on the ecological history of the canals and wetlands system of Kolkata is widely popular and part of environmental studies curriculum in South Asian and western academia. She has published in reputed journals such as Environment and Urbanization, Frontiers in Water, Cities, WIREs Water, Urban Research and Practice, Marine Policy, etc. She is investigating several large-scale global partnership projects on community livelihoods in coastal and deltaic geographies. She is the only Indian representative for the Association of Asian Environmental History.

Dr. Anuradha Choudry is a Faculty at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Kharagpur and the Outreach Coordinator for the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) Division, Ministry of Education, Government of India. She specializes in cultural heritage and community traditions for ecosystem-dependent societies inhabiting vulnerable delta ecologies such as the Chilika and the Sundarbans. She is the recipient of many prestigious awards and accolades from institutes such as the European Union of Yoga, the United Nations, and IIT Kharagpur. She is investigating several international projects, focusing on psycho-social wellbeing of communities inhabiting volatile landscapes. 

Dr. Uday Chatterjee is an assistant professor at the Department of Geography, Bhatter College, Dantan, India, and an applied geographer with a doctoral degree in applied geography awarded by Ravenshaw University, India. His research interests include urban planning, social and human geography, applied geomorphology, hazards and disasters, environmental issues, disaster governance, community-based disaster risk management, climate change adaptation, and urban risk management. Currently, Dr. Chatterjee is involved in an international project in collaboration with Indonesia, Malaysia, and Japan, funded by the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research. He has served as a reviewer for many international journals and is a guest editor of the special issue “Social Ecology, Human Well-being and Sustainability” of the Springer journal Global Social Welfare. He has published 30 research papers, 10 edited books, 2 authored books, 11 book chapters, and 2 conference proceedings.