It could not have been more poignant than this when a sea of humanity in the heart of the rain-starved Saurashtra region in Gujarat took a pledge here on Sunday to conserve water by adopting drip irrigation on a massive scale and check the mining of groundwater.

A staggering 1.25 lakh people from across 4,800 villages of the State’s largest region that often falls prey to drought-like situations gathered on the bone-dry catchment of the Bhadar dam to decide to conserve water and appeal to the State and Central governments to speed up solutions to their water woes.