As the 'water tower of Asia' dries out, villagers learn to recharge their springs

In a remote village in the Himalayan foothills, Kiran Joshi stands with a smartphone timer in one hand and a red plastic bucket in the other. Carefully, she places the bucket under a stream of flowing water and stops the timer once the bucket is full. She repeats the measurement three times to ensure the accuracy before looking up. "Thirteen seconds," she says.

Joshi is calculating the volume of water coming from a mountain spring in her village of Raushil in the state of Uttarakhand, India. There are roughly 3 million such springs emanating from the Indian Himalayan Region, but in 2017, the Indian government released a concerning report saying nearly half of them have run dry or are becoming seasonal.

As climate change exacerbates water scarcity issues in northern India, villagers like Joshi are fighting to revive these sources of spring water that millions of people