On the night of the Deepdan (a traditional offering of a lighted lamp), Kamlesh Malaiya stood on the new riverfront in Nakatuwa and looked at something he had stopped expecting to see: a crowd, gathered along the Singri River in celebration.

Between 1,000 and 1,500 people had come to watch lamps glow on the water. With the banks lit up after dark, the evening felt like a festival to him.

The 47-year-old sarpanch of Nakatuwa gram panchayat, with a total population of around 15,000 households, could not stop comparing it with the river of his boyhood.

"Behind my family home in Narsinghpur, Madhya Pradesh, the Singri was once the neighbourhood's washing line, bathing spot and, for many, its drinking water supply. Washermen beat clothes on its stones, children splashed in the shallows, and nobody thought twice about drinking from it. The river was our lifeline," he says with deep fondness.

Then the river changed, so slowly that few people noticed the day it finally became nothing more than a drainage canal. By then, Kamlesh was a grown man.

"The Singri had become an open drain, thick with waste and so foul-smelling that standing near it for more than a minute was an ordeal," he says.

Looking at it now, with families walking along its banks, he still finds it hard to believe.

The man who set this turnaround in motion is Gajendra Singh Nagesh, Chief Executive Officer of the Zilla Panchayat, Narsinghpur, who took charge in September 2025. He decided to rebuild the river with gram panchayats, local labour, stone and borrowed machinery, rather than contractors, concrete or steel.

A tributary the Narmada cannot afford to lose

The Singri flows for 39.6 km before joining the Narmada just beyond Narsinghpur town, where around 80,000 people live along its banks. The river originates in the district’s Bachai village with a total approximate catchment area of 3.89 square kilometers. Along its course lie 21 rural local bodies and one urban local body. A district survey counted roughly 25 rivers and streams in Narsinghpur that feed the Narmada.

For a district that spreads across roughly 5,000 sq km of the Narmada valley and has no coastline, glacier or large reservoir of its own, these small tributaries matter more than their size suggests. They are what keep the Narmada alive in the stretches where it would otherwise run thin.

The Singri's troubles were noticed long before this project. Earlier this year, the Narsinghpur municipality had prepared a detailed plan of nearly Rs 15 crore for the town stretch, with stone pitching,  and a pathway, and it is under tender process. Encroachment and sewage had already put the river's very existence at risk.

A river That people stopped using

Ask Ganesh Mehra how the Singri declined, and he dates it precisely. The 38-year-old lives 500 metres from the river in Nakatuwa and remembers swimming, bathing and washing clothes there as a young man. After 2000, he says, the river was tied into the sewage and drainage lines, and his family stopped going near it.

In summer, the water thinned out. In the monsoon, it surged back so close to the houses that flooding became a worry in recent years. The smell followed him indoors.

"It used to stink so much that we boiled all our water before drinking it. Now it is much better," he says.

Nagesh saw this version of the river when he first walked it in January 2026.

"The stream was only 15 to 20 metres wide, and in places the bed looked more like an open field than a river," he tells The Better India.

Houses, godowns and vehicle workshops had pushed up against the banks. Travellers on National Highway 44 near Rausara flung sacks of waste into the channel as they passed. Cattle wandered through the bed, grey and black water from the town trickled in, and aquatic life had vanished.

Nagesh had spent 25 years in the administrative service, and water was the one subject that had always held his attention. The Narmada gave the problem its urgency: it does not flow through the year in stretches such as Mandla and Dindori, and relies on its tributaries to stay........

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