Five years ago, Bhim Singh lost all of his groundnut crop because his fellow villagers did not let him dig a borewell. With the advantage of hindsight, he is happy they stopped him. He says it demonstrated the commitment of the villagers to preserve and judiciously use the water resources at their disposal. Preventing Bhim Singh was Amritya's first brush with blocking borewells, though the village in Rajasthan's parched Bhilwara district had begun other conservation projects earlier. Bhim Singh was alive to the transition that Amritya's action against him marked. "There were two possibilities; either I would be ostracised or others would follow suit. I lost Rs 7,000- Rs 8,000 but all of us benefited in the end,' he says.
Caste no bar Amritya village is pretty mixed with roughly equal number of families from the upper and other backward castes, and Scheduled Tribes.Bhim Singh was a Thakur, but that didn't mean that he was above the rules framed by the village collectively. Having stopped Bhim Singh, Amritya took on nearby villages, even when it entailed fighting powerful upper-caste groups.

The resistance to the borewells is grounded in the realisation that they are disastrous in a water-deficient region. In 2004, another person, Barda Dhakad from Ladpura, attempted to dig a borewell in a land closer to Amritya. The villagers tried to stop this