The Doha Model: Turning Rainwater into Rural Resilience

Shri Madhukar Dhas — Dilasa’s founder — was travelling from village to village, as he did constantly in the organisation’s early years, when he noticed something simple: a pothole in the road was still holding water after the rain, while the ground all around it had already dried out and the runoff was gone.

That one observation turned into a question — if a pothole could trap and hold rainwater by accident, could a similar depression be created on purpose, somewhere it would actually do some good, like along a dry streambed, and get the same effect deliberately?

That question became the Doha concept. The name itself comes from Marathi, where “doha” refers to stored or retained water, so the structure is literally named after what it does. From a single roadside observation, Dilasa developed and scaled the idea into the saucer-shaped excavations, built in sequence along seasonal streams, that now define the Doha Model across its working villages.