For over two decades, ITC’s Sunehra Kal project has built a Soil and Moisture Conservation Programme to support, and revive, livelihoods and ecosystems in rural India.

Scenes of labour migration set the context for the critical fallout that comes from a national water crisis. Memories are triggered, and farmers narrate their history in a time when they had nothing to eat, and nothing would grow.

Through partnerships with village panchayats, ITC helped build and revive water harvesting structures to reverse land degradation, provide perennial irrigation, and transform agricultural productivity.

The story is told through the eyes of farmers who have witnessed a return of water on dry land, and of a way of life that sustained not just families, but communities.

With an impact covering over 968, 000 acres and 301, 200 households, water becomes a starting point for a holistic social revolution.

The challenge we faced as filmmakers was to show the actual scale this programme had unfolded in - an unprecedented public or private effort towards water conservation – but also show what that scale means in daily lived realities of rural India.

Hence, the film brings in micro perspectives, individual portraits that humanise the macro reality. With an ethnographic bent, large-scale environment intervention is seen through the eyes of farmers and communities who are directly affected by the disappearance of the very same environment. The long filming time allowed us to engage with multiple realities over a sustained period of time. As water returns, in dams, lakes and tanks, migration patterns changed, as do spending and education patterns. The film, as a classical documentary, bears witness.

Since the film brings the macro scale of transformation alive through the micro realities of communities and farmers, the filmmaking strategy involved ethnographic immersions with various communities and villages across India, a seasonal mapping to gauge light and water movements for camera, and a script development that involved humanising two decades of data.

The program the film documents has been working in states of India, for over two decades. Extensive field research was undertaken to gather evidence – qualitative and quantitative – of the traditional knowledge systems around water, their feasibility in current agrarian climate, and how scientific developments could be used in combination with community knowledge to revive water structures.

Documentation of the project’s impact started 15 years ago. Evidence was collected, and the filmmaking team interviewed dozens of farmers in multiple districts. Seasons were mapped to see various stages of water behaviour – and how irrigation patterns changed accordingly.

The actual filming occurred over 2.5 years in 6 states. Characters and themes were identified, but the central protagonists remained the revived water bodies, and the recuperated land and forests.

The film is a part of a campaign on the idea of sustainable growth, and a new idea of development that will simultaneously fuel economic growth, create sustainable livelihoods and replenish the environment. The campaign will go live worldwide by later half of 2019.

This film along with others will also be shown in a physical museum like experience centre dedicated to ITC's beliefs and ideas on sustainable growth.