Family Trees
Shyam Sunder Paliwal was the sarpanch of Piplantri, a village in Rajasthan’s Rajsamand district, between 2005 and 2010. His father helped a marble company establish a unit in the village. In return, the company let his family sell its scrap marble, making them affluent. Over the years, excessive marble mining and sporadic droughts caused a severe depletion in the village’s groundwater levels. Water could not be found in the area, even by drilling tube wells four hundred feet deep.
On 21 August 2006, Kiran, Paliwal’s 16-year-old daughter, died of dehydration after suffering from diarrhoea. Devastated by her death and recognising the urgent need to rejuvenate the water table, Paliwal launched the Kiran Nidhi Yojana, in 2007. The KNY
