First graduate in his family, now district collector reviving dry wells

Every monsoon, Prathap M watched the same scene play out. Rain hammered the concrete drains of Tiruvallur, sending stormwater racing toward canals and the sea. Hours later, the roads were dry. And so were the wells.

It was a contradiction he knew by heart. Prathap grew up in Virudhunagar in a farming family where water was measured by the bucket, not the borewell. He was the first in his family to graduate, cycling kilometres each day to reach school. Water wasn’t just a resource at home. It was a season-long calculation, a worry that sat at the dinner table.

Years later, as District Collector of Tiruvallur, he found that old anxiety waiting for him in village after village. Farmers were drilling deeper for water that no longer seemed to exist. Borewells stood capped and silent, headstones for aquifers that had run dry. Yet every monsoon, thousands of litres of rainwater slipped past the thirsty ground, carried away by drains.The district didn’t need another mega project, he decided. It needed to look down.

Across Tiruvallur, thousands of dead borewells lay forgotten. To most people, they were failures — expensive holes that once promised water and delivered dust. To Prathap, they looked like something else: straws pushed deep into the earth, waiting.

His administration began reimagining what was already there. Instead of sealing the past, they asked if those abandoned borewells could be turned into channels, letting monsoon runoff sink straight back into the ground it had once given up.

For a boy who once measured water by the season, the idea was simple. Don’t let the rain escape. Teach the old wells to drink again.