India, March 4 -- On Sunday evening, Janak Daftari returned to his beloved Mithi, as family and close friends gathered to immerse his ashes in a rivulet of Powai Lake, which flows into the Mithi River. Daftari, who died on February 27 at 74, had spent the last decades of his life striving to revive the river - making this final tribute a fitting one for a man so deeply connected to its waters.

An alumnus of IIT-Bombay, Daftari was one of the first to identify the mismanagement of the Mithi as a key factor behind the devastating floods in Mumbai in 2005. "My father worked in computer hardware and peripherals till the late '90s, till he was taken in the early 2000s by the work Rajendra Singh, the 'Waterman of India', was doing in reviving ...