WUNRN
Women's Feature Service - WFS
By Pamela Philipose
The women of Itaha Kalpi in Uttar Pradesh's Jalaun district draw maps on the floor with charcoal and chalk , and use to analyze women's issues and very much the water crisis for women. (Credit: WFS)
Jalaun (Women’s
Feature Service) - At 11 am, Itaha Kalpi, in Uttar Pradesh’s (UP) Jalaun
district, could be any village in the vast, rolling heartland of India: A few
neem trees, a cluster of tenements, the majority of which are still tiled in
the old-fashioned way, tethered buffaloes peaceably chewing their cud, some
scuttling hens guiding their broods across stone paved lanes. Add to this list
the ubiquitous sight of women at hand pumps, endlessly filling up their buckets
and canisters for home and hearth, and you get a snapshot of Itaha Kalpi.
For the women here, procuring water has emerged as the single biggest task of their day. Ask them when they get some rest and they will ironically retort, “Only when we die.” Their words reflect the crisis confronting this village, and many others like it that fall in the drought-hit Bundelkhand region of UP.
Itahi Kalpi’s women
understand the crisis of water because it has come right into their homes. Some
of them can even map it for you, thanks to the efforts of the Parmarth Samaj
Sevi Sansthan, a civil society organisation based in Orai, the headquarters of
Jalaun district. Says Mamata, a cluster coordinator with Parmarth, who has been
regularly visiting this village for the last three years, “In 2008, when I
first came here, we set up a discussion group and main issue that figured was
water, especially drinking water. Women complained they spent all their time
collecting water, even up to five hours a day.”
Parmarth now hopes,
through a project supported by the European Union, to build awareness at the
village level and lobby with the authorities at the district level to establish
the principle that women in Bundelkhand must have first right to water. It is
also working to forge a network of ‘jal sahelis’, or water friends, between the
women in the region, to put this agenda on the table.
Reveals Mamata, “At
first, nobody sat together to talk. We also found that the women were too shy
to speak before the men, and retreated behind their long ‘gunghats’ (ends of
the sari used to cover faces). That’s when we set up a separate women’s group.”
When Mamata asked the
local women how many houses there were in the village, they hadn’t a clue. The
also didn’t know the existing water resources. They couldn’t tell her how many
hand pumps there were and how many wells. Women who had come to the village as
brides a quarter of a century ago, just could not perceive their immediate
neighbourhood in any precise way. “I then told them, the government does not
listen to one woman. But if all of them came together as a group, they had a
better chance of being heard. By themselves they were nothing, but if 20 of
them speak together, it becomes an issue.”
That was how the
women of Itaha Kalpi came together across caste lines and set up a Self-Help
Group (SHG). They also became barefoot cartographers. As Mamata explains, the
idea of mapping the neighbourhood was to help build awareness, “We put together
our knowledge of the village by drawing it on the floor. Once the map took
shape, everybody could see for themselves the lie of the land. They could see
that while one locality in the village may have a couple of handpumps, another
had none. How some wells had brackish water and how that means that the women
using it have to go further in search of drinking water.” Slowly, the number of
those who lived in the village became evident. The women discovered that there
were 427 males and 397 females in the village; that there were 98 Other Backward
Castes (OBCs) and the rest were Dalits.
The women in Itaha
Kalpi had always done rangoli patterns outside their lintels, especially on
festive occasions. So they brought this talent to their map making. Different
colours were used to denote different things: Black from charcoal powder,
denoted “pakki sadak”, or paved roads. Brick powder indicated bricked roads,
while pink chalk powder was for mud tracks, or “katchchi sadak”. Green dots
indicated houses, blue circles represented wells, and blue arrows pointed to
hand pumps.
Explains Munni Devi,
a local, “In this way we got a complete knowledge of our village. We understood
why it took some of us so much longer to fill our buckets, than others.” The
women then decided to make their maps portable. “First we drew our map on the
ground, literally like a rangoli, and then put it on the chart paper that our
children used in school, so that we could take it around and show it to others
in the village - and most importantly – to administrators and decision makers
in the district.”
In 2009, the village
women petitioned their pradhan and the authorities agreed to fill up a dried up
pond with water. That was not all. A ‘dharna’ (sit in) was organised outside
the District Magistrate’s (DM) office, during which the women took their empty
clay pitchers and broke them before the DM. This was in 2010 and the action had
an immediate impact: Two hand pumps were re-bored and two wells were cleaned.
“Earlier nobody ever
saw themselves as being able to argue their case before the authorities. That
changed. A lot of inhibitions were shed,” remarks Aarti Devi, who assists
Mamata. “They got a good idea of what their resources were and what they can
expect from the government. They could now talk about wages on government work
sites and explain that while they were supposed to receive Rs 100 a day
(US$1=Rs 45.2), they got only half of that.”
Hemlata, another
village resident, excitedly interrupts her, “We shouted at the officials,
saying it is our right to get our full wages.” Another woman smiles and
reveals, “I told them I needed to pay for rakhis for my brothers, so they had
better pay me!”
The map on the floor,
meanwhile, began to grow. Says Akanksha Devi, 15, “We would now draw ‘pakka
ghar’ (bricked homes) and ‘kachcha ghar’ (mud huts). We drew the ‘mandir’
(temple), the school, the local tank. We drew trees – neem, peepal, mango,
eucalyptus and jackfruit. We also drew to show our fields and the crops that
grew there, including wheat, channa, masur, moong, arhar.”
One issue did emerge
very strongly in all this map making: The need for education. Says Akanksha,
who goes to the local school, “Women who could not write anything, learnt to
write their own names. The feeling in these parts is that a kisan (farmer)
doesn’t need education. But actually we understood why we needed to educate
ourselves.” She herself plans to go to college after finishing high school. Her
friend, Akilesh Kumari, 18 – who stitches garments to make a little extra money
– has now started going to college twice a week and hopes to get a Bachelors
degree in Hindi in three years’ time.
All the women in
Mamata’s circle recognise that in order to live better lives they need, first
of all, access to water; and that since women have had to spend a good part of
their lives collecting it, they should have the first right to it. As one woman
put it, “If we spend all our time hauling water like cattle, we become cattle.
So it is time they gave us water - water to drink, water for our animals, water
for our farms.”
The maps of Itaha
Kalpi have taught the women here many things and Mamata hopes that they will
continue to do that. “Now we plan to make maps of the resources of each
household. From there we can talk about the sharing of resources. In fact we
plan to map everything that impacts our lives.”