Beneath the ground: How a Telangana village is securing its water future

From groundwater-recharge projects in nearby villages to high-efficiency cooling in its datacenter facilities, Microsoft is supporting a more water-resilient future around its India South Central region.

At first glance, there is nothing remarkable about the soak pit on Pittala Raju’s farm in Elikatta, a village in Telangana’s Ranga Reddy district. Standing next to rows of chilies, he points to a small, cement lid, beside which stands a simple electric controller box, the type farmers use every day to switch groundwater pumps on and off.

For Raju, who farms 20 guntas, or approximately half an acre, the modest structure has changed his crop yield. Across villages surrounding Microsoft’s India South Central datacenter region, community groundwater projects are helping farmers prepare for increasing water stress before it becomes visible.

Like many smallholder farmers in this part of the country, Raju depends on groundwater as the main source of irrigation. However, with uneven rainfall and stretched summers, water that once seemed abundant had begun to feel uncertain.

When United Way of Hyderabad (UWH), Microsoft’s community partner, proposed a soak pit with six structural rings, Raju decided to dig deeper and added additional four rings. The resulting 10-foot structure captures rainwater during the monsoon and allows it to percolate underground, helping recharge the aquifer connected to his borewell.

“The co-investment paid off. Today, there’s a 20 percent rise in my income, as it allowed me to go from two crop cycles to four. I am able to cultivate paddy, tomato, chilies and other vegetables,” he says.

A region in transition

In Elikatta, while borewells continued to function, a village-wide groundwater assessment commissioned by UWH between late 2024 and early 2025, found that groundwater availability was becoming increasingly seasonal and uneven across the village. The findings helped identify where recharge structures could potentially have the greatest value.

“Water stress isn’t always visible. Borewells may still be functioning, but the data showed that groundwater availability was becoming increasingly seasonal and unreliable,” says Aditi Khandekar, Strategy and Impact Lead at UWH. The team spent the first six months convincing farmers that recharge was needed.

“The intervention gave us a foresight of what will happen and we started preparing when the community didn’t yet see it as a dire need,” explains Khandekar. “We have a head start in replenishing groundwater while the region is undergoing significant geographical and socioeconomic change,” she adds.

Global goal, local restoration

For communities where groundwater is a critical resource, reducing water demand matters alongside replenishment efforts.

And it starts with the region’s design. The India South Central uses high-efficiency air-cooled systems, which do not use water for cooling, even as it supports cloud and AI workloads.

The same principle shapes Microsoft’s broader approach to water stewardship: reducing operational water demand while supporting projects that help replenish and strengthen local water resources. In FY25, Microsoft replenished more water than it withdrew across its global operations for the first time on its journey toward becoming water positive by 2030.

Through its Datacenter Community Pledge, Microsoft works with local partners in the Hyderabad region on groundwater recharge, rainwater harvesting and watershed resilience. The assessment identified where recharge was needed. Convincing farmers to act on those findings was a different challenge altogether

When proof travels through a village

In Elikatta, proof began to travel from one field to another. While the study established the need for recharge, farmers’ experiences helped establish trust.

One of the early adopters of the bore charger intervention was Pittala Balaiah, a farmer in his mid-70s, who cultivates paddy and maize on over an acre of land. Before the recharge intervention, Balaiah says water from his borewell was largely dependable only during the monsoon months. After installing a bore charger on his farm, he began encouraging younger farmers to consider similar interventions.

His role soon extended beyond his own farm. Neighbors visited to see the structure for themselves, ask questions and understand how it worked. For many, seeing a recharge intervention on a familiar field proved more convincing than a technical presentation or groundwater assessment.

“As village elder, younger farmers listen to me,” he says.  His decision gave others the confidence to try.

Balaiah’s participation helped create a ripple effect across the village. Farmers who were initially uncertain about groundwater recharge began exploring similar interventions after seeing the results firsthand.

Among them was Shekaraiah, a paddy farmer, who had already experienced the consequences of declining groundwater. When his first borewell began to weaken, he drilled another. But the water continued to recede, affecting not only his farm but also his household. Watching the change on neighboring farms convinced him to join the effort. “The water tank is not empty anymore,” he says.

Soak pits and bore chargers work in different ways but both slow the runoff and give rainfall more chances to recharge groundwater reserves.

Measuring change over time

Farmers are reporting encouraging changes, but the programme has not yet completed a village-wide endline assessment to determine whether groundwater levels have risen across Elikatta.

Narasimha, sarpanch of the Elikatta gram panchayat, calls the recharge structures “a very useful initiative,” noting that a rise in water levels has been observed in a few borewells. “The farmers are happy with the results,” he says.

But he is candid that the work is far from finished. Water availability, he adds, remains a real constraint. “Many borewells in the village still need recharge support and we need similar structures in more locations to improve groundwater availability,” he adds.

Currently, in Elikatta, the initiative has installed 16 bore chargers and 10 soak pits in the first phase, with more sites identified for the next phase, while building a broader culture of groundwater stewardship across the community and reaching more than 500 villagers through water-awareness activities.

UWH estimates that the interventions have added roughly five million liters of groundwater-recharge capacity across Elikatta by June 2026.

“The endline assessment has not yet been undertaken and is planned for the pre-monsoon period in 2027,” says Khandekar.  “Groundwater is a shared resource and community participation creates ownership from the beginning. The larger ambition is to establish Elikatta as a scalable water-secure community, demonstrating how local stewardship and scientific water management can build resilience for future generations,” she adds.

For farmers like Raju, those ambitions are measured in simpler terms, as to whether there is enough water beneath the ground to support another crop cycle.One soak pit or bore charger cannot tell the story of an entire watershed. What it shows is how change begins, when evidence on one farm gives another farmer a reason to act.

Top image: Farmers work in a field in Elikatta village, Ranga Reddy district, Telangana. Photo by Selvaprakash Lakshmanan for Microsoft.