Ramgarh Lake

Thirty-odd kilometres north-east of Jaipur, the road out of Amer climbs through scrub-covered Aravalli ridges and then, quite suddenly, runs alongside something enormous and empty.

• Ramgarh is Jaipur's largest reservoir, and for most of the last twenty-five years it has been a reservoir without a lake — a vast pale bowl of cracked silt and grass where 15 square kilometres of water once stood.
• What remains, and what makes the trip worthwhile, is the engineering: a solid masonry bund roughly four kilometres long, laid in stone and lime mortar, marching across the valley with sluice towers and cut-stone steps that would not look out of place on a fort.
• Standing on it, you are looking at one of princely Jaipur's most ambitious public works, stripped back to its bones.
• The dates deserve care, because sources disagree and many websites do not.
• The masonry dam across the Banganga was a project of Maharaja Sawai Madho Singh II; its foundation is recorded as laid in December 1897, with completion generally given as 1903 (some accounts say 1901 or 1904 — treat any single confident year with suspicion).
• Wikipedia, meanwhile, credits an earlier lake here to Sawai Ram Singh II in 1876, which likely refers to an earlier embankment on the same site.
• What is not disputed: water reached Jaipur city from Ramgarh from 1931, and in 1982 the lake was clean and deep enough to host the rowing events of the Asian Games. The decline came fast.
• The feeder rivers — Banganga, Roda, Tala, Madhoveni — were choked by check dams, mining and encroachment across a catchment of several hundred square kilometres.
• Most records put the last real filling at 1999, with the bed dry from around 2000; a few date it to 2006.
• The Rajasthan High Court has repeatedly ordered the catchment cleared, hundreds of hectares have been freed, and repair and beautification work on the dam was launched in April 2025.
• The Ram Jal Setu Link Project (the renamed ERCP) proposes piping water some 120 km from Isarda Dam.
• An experimental drone-and-AI cloud-seeding attempt over the dry bed in August 2025 was called off on the day.
• Come expecting a story in progress, not a lake.
• The forest around it was declared the Jamwa Ramgarh sanctuary in 1982 and is the quiet reward: chital and nilgai step out at dusk, peafowl call constantly, and there are fort ruins and the Jambwa Mata temple in the folds of the hills.
• Birdlife is thin without water, but raptors work the ridges.
• For vegetarian travellers, the honest advice is to eat before you come or after you leave.
• There is no reliable pure-veg, verified-eggless kitchen at the lake itself — roadside stalls along the Jamwa Ramgarh road are vegetarian by custom but unverified on egg, so carry water and snacks.
• Jaipur's old city, about 35 km back, is where you eat properly.