What if a simple robot could revive a dying borewell? Meet the Pune engineer whose ingenious invention has recharged thousands of borewells with 650 CRORE litres of water across India!
In 2013, Maharashtra saw its worst drought in 40 years. Villages behind the Western Ghats — Shelkewadi, Randulabad, Satichiwadi — turned into dust bowls. Hand pumps ran dry. Farmers abandoned their fields.
But far away, one man was rethinking his life. Rahul Bakare had spent years coding in the US gaming industry. Money was good, comfort plenty… yet something was missing.
One question haunted him: Why do farmers still take their lives over water? To find answers, he returned to India and bought a small farm. Friends laughed, but Rahul wasn’t chasing profit — he was chasing understanding.
That journey led him to Rohini Nilekani’s Arghyam Foundation, where he worked on over 80 water projects. He saw one pattern repeat: rain came, rain went, but never reached the underground aquifers.
Rahul realised something shocking: our borewells were running like ATMs — only for withdrawing water, not depositing it. Deeply worried, he began researching solutions.
And this sparked the idea — what if borewells could be treated like clogged arteries? What if we performed ‘angioplasty’ on them to create channels for rainwater to flow into the veins below?
And so, joining hands with hydrogeologist Vinit Phadnis, Rahul launched Urdhvam Environmental Technologies. Their brilliant invention? BoreCharger.
This patented robot descends into existing borewells and creates precise perforations in the casing — allowing water from upper aquifers to recharge deeper, dried-up ones.
The results have been extraordinary — over 4,000 borewells revived across 12 Indian states and even West Africa, with a 95% success rate. Billions of litres of water recharged. Entire villages freed from tanker dependency.
The best part? It’s affordable. One BoreCharger intervention costs just Rs 25,000–Rs 40,000 — a fraction of drilling a new borewell. It’s a one-time, long-term solution that saves money and secures water.
BoreCharger has been featured on Shark Tank India. Rahul is now working with government missions like Jal Shakti Abhiyan and AMRUT 2.0 to scale his mission — training local hydrogeologists so that every Indian village can secure its own water future.