EARTHKEEPERS

IN RAJASTHAN’S THAR DESERT AND NEPAL’S TERRACED FIELDS, REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE IS A QUIET REVOLUTION LED BY THOSE WHO LISTEN TO THE LAND.

By Megan Hullander

Step into the Thar Desert, where the wind rewrites the terrain by the hour. The local name, Marwar—from the Sanskrit Maru Desa, translating to “land of death”—feels like a warning. It conjures images of a relentless sun, cracked earth, and the kind of silence that makes you aware of your own heartbeat. A thousand miles away, the foothills of Nepal tell a similar story. Not one about land as an abstraction, but something more immediate: the hands that create an unlikely stage for agricultural revival.

Against the dust, vibrant saris flash like signals of intent. The women wearing them are caretakers of their families and practitioners of a stubborn line of work. They are farmers, engaging daily in an environmental alchemy, harvesting rainwater with tanks, coaxing crops from sandy soil, and tending to livestock with methods refined across generations.

GRAVIS, a community-based organization founded in 1983 in Gagadi, Rajasthan, is a linchpin of this transformation. Inspired by Gandhian principles—most notably Sarvodaya (“all rising, but the last person first”) and Gram Swaraj (village self-rule)—it operates on ideas that sound deceptively simple: self-reliance, collective uplift, and the belief that survival isn’t enough when thriving is an option. “We faced many challenges in the earliest years,” Shashi Tyagi, who founded GRAVIS alongside her husband, said before her passing in 2020. “There were foot marches and breakdowns. There was no staff or outside resources. It was only our Gandhian ideology that sustained us through those difficult times. As the organization has grown, we have sought to instill those values in our team and community partners. As we move ahead towards our goal, all our actions will be guided by these same ideals.”

Water barely registers as a presence in the Thar. Women, often tasked with trekking miles and miles to collect it, know this viscerally. GRAVIS tilts the equation. Rainwater is amassed underground in taanka reservoirs, capable of recalibrating the rhythm of a household. Water, once a capricious variable, becomes a constant. Time is freed up, and with time comes the possibility of better nutrition and education, opening up what is expected of a day, a life.

In Nepal, a country that sees six traditional seasons, each with its own meteorological and agricultural logic, water moves differently. Monsoons cascade down hills, replenishing terraced fields. Higher up, glacial melts give way to gravity and sun, feeding the braided rivers that lace through the valleys. These landscapes reward patience, responsiveness, and attunement to cycles. To cultivate here is to enter an ongoing negotiation with flux itself.

Measured in numbers—over 2,000 villages, 1.8 million people, and 4,000 community institutions across Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, and Bundelkhand—GRAVIS’s impact is staggering. But these figures miss the texture of it: the way knowledge is passed down, the way leadership is not so much taken as grown into. Self-help groups form, stories are exchanged, and change, when it comes, feels organic.

The same philosophy guides agricultural communities in Nepal, where traditional seed networks remain vital, functioning alternatives to the monolithic logic of industrial agriculture. Whereas those monocultures—predicated on efficiency, yield, and the dubious promise of scientific progress—flatten biodiversity into something ornamental, the farmers here operate on a different plane of understanding. Theirs is a system in which biodiversity is a necessity. Medical plants tangle with heritage grains; pulses planted in precise configurations bolster the soil and the human ecosystems that rely on them.

Seed-saving preserves the encoded intelligence of a thousand growing seasons, through families, across generations. This education happens in the granular details: the way a particular soil crumbles between fingers, the scent of rain before it falls, the instinctive knowing of when to plant and when to wait. “We have reintroduced the cultivation of traditional crops and nurture our farm land by using techniques that restore soil health and sustain biodiversity,” says Rene Vijay Shrestha Einhaus, owner of Dwarika’s Organic Farms in Nepal. “This approach is not just about growing food, it is about regenerating agricultural knowledge and being an example for a sustainable future.”

The relationship between land and people is knotty, ineffable. The Babul tree—gnarled, spined, drought-proof—functions both as a bulwark and an icon. Its roots grip Rajasthan’s desert floor like a fist, while its branches hold scraps of cloth, wind-worn offerings. In Rajasthan’s villages, fabric hangs between temple wires, a visual palimpsest where past and present blur. The textiles in Nepal carry a similar gravity, dyed and spun in ways that reference the land from which they came.

Laurence Ellis took to these communities to document their dualities: fragility and strength, tradition and innovation, laughter and labor. Here, life does not bloom extravagantly; it accrues, deliberate and persistent. Regeneration begins, as always, with faith. In the soil. In each other. In the possibility of a more abundant tomorrow.