Dreaming of a better future for India’s downtrodden farmers, Bhavarlal Jain created the world’s second-largest micro-irrigation company.

Until recently Ram Krishna Khodpe and his four brothers were eking out a meager living cultivating cotton on their 5-acre farm in the semiarid region of Jalgaon in India’s western state of Maharashtra. To supplement his family’s income, Khodpe ran a small shop selling sugarcane juice.

Then two years ago he saw a drip irrigation system being demonstrated in his village. This uses a motorized pump to push water through long black plastic tubes that are laid out in rows along the base of the plants. Instead of flooding the field, just the required amount of water “drips” slowly through intermittent holes in the tubes directly onto the plant’s roots.