About half of the 6,000 water bodies that once defined Chennai and its two neighboring districts are gone. Rampant development has destroyed the spaces that were natural sponges for monsoon rains.

But while reporting on environmental crises across India, I have witnessed effective efforts to renew natural capital through green infrastructure. In the Alwar District of the northern state of Rajasthan I stood on a hillside looking down on a once-barren but now verdant valley that had been brought back to life by villagers who built small-scale earthen dams known as “johads.”

Thousands had been constructed across the district, strategically placed to capture fleeting monsoon rains in a cascade before the water “ran away,” as a local told me. Aquifers — layers of water-permeable rock — were recharged, and wells that had been dry for a generation bubbled back into existence.

Similar efforts are scattered across India. In the Kumbharwadi watershed of the western Indian state of Maharashtra, a program engaged locals in tree-planting and land-sculpting to capture water across the landscape. Groundwater levels rose, soil fertility improved, and agricultural income increased tenfold. In four years, the water tankers that citizens had depended upon in the dry season became obsolete.

Admittedly, these techniques of maintaining natural resources locally require more labor, but with unemployment higher than it has been since the 1970s, that translates to jobs.

With 90 percent of the country’s precious freshwater going to agriculture, India could also support established conservation practices and reconsider exporting such water-intensive crops as rice and cotton.

India is urbanizing at a rapid pace, and amid that human density lies opportunity. Chennai attempted to employ rainwater harvesting in 2003 that would have diverted rooftop water to tanks so that it could percolate down, compensating for the urban layer of concrete that now seals underground aquifers from monsoon abundance and contributes to flooding. But three years later, a new party was voted in and enforcement stopped. Additionally, metering could help isolate and fix the leaks that waste a staggering one-third of all Indian water.