WUNRN
INDIA - DROUGHT/DISASTERS -
INEQUALITIES & POVERTY - GIRLS & WOMEN
The Hindu - It's
a long way home. Photo: Mahesh Harilal
June 9, 2012 - Drought, and its
devastating impact on women and children, is not news anymore.
Imagine your
eight-year-old daughter carrying a five-litre pot of water on her head and
making at least three trips a day in the scorching heat to the nearest water
source. For those of us for whom water flows out of a tap, such a scene is
unimaginable. Yet even as the media obsessed about the controversies
surrounding the Indian Premier League (IPL) last month, scores of young girls
were doing precisely this in hundreds of villages across Maharashtra and in
other parts of
If you read the
newspapers in Mumbai, you would not necessarily know that 7,296 villages in 15
of the state's 35 districts are suffering from acute drought conditions and
shortage of water. There have already been water riots. People have died or are
dying from the lack of potable water. And even if they get some water, the heat
is killing them.
Looking the other
way
Drought, we are
constantly told by politicians, is an annual occurrence and therefore should
not cause alarm. Perhaps that explains why this year, the media, with a few
honourable exceptions, has chosen to look the other way. In the past, before we
became so obsessed with the conduct and lives of just a handful of people in
the country, most newspapers would routinely cover the drought. Inevitably, you
would see a photograph of an old farmer in some drought-stricken village
looking woefully at the cracked baked earth that was once his field. Or of a
woman desperately trying to collect water at the bottom of a muddy pit. Today
we don't see even these predictable images. And perhaps as a result, much of
the urban middle class
Natural disasters such
as droughts or floods take a heavy toll on all — but more on children and the
elderly. And women. The gendered division of labour has trapped poor rural
women into being the chief collectors and carriers of water, a job that they
certainly did not choose. And if mothers are doing this, inevitably their
daughters will also be expected to do the same. But what happens to such young
girls after successive droughts?
The effects are
visible in the short term. These children are most likely to be
under-nourished. The amount of food they get at such times would be further
reduced. On paper, all these children receive a free mid-day meal or are fed in
the Anganwadis if they are infants. But schools are shut in the summer, as are
most Anganwadis — although the latter should remain open. As a result, even the
little nourishment these children get in normal times is denied to them at a
time when they have to undertake tough physical labour in conditions where even
sturdy adults would wilt.
Government figures on
child mortality in these circumstances are rarely accurate. No government will
admit that children die because they are compelled to walk miles in the sun to
fetch water in temperatures exceeding 45 degrees. But over time these are the
children that then get added to the list of stunted, under-nourished and
malnourished children.
At a disadvantage
Apart from the
physical signs of less food and malnutrition, other aspects such as sensory and
cognitive development of the children are also affected. In other words, these
children will never be able to compete with other children who are better
nourished and will suffer a lifetime of disadvantage. Unicef has also pointed
out that girls face a greater risk than boys due to malnutrition because of
their “lower social status”. Not only are they not wanted at birth but if and
when they are born, they are expected to carry some part of the physical
burdens that their mothers already carry. Fetching water is one such task that
inevitably falls on the backs of young girls.
There is no magic wand
to wish away drought conditions. But the root cause is not the heat of summer
but the overconsumption of groundwater sources, the lack of a policy to
conserve and replenish what is there, and to ensure equity in distribution of
water. Wherever such policies have been followed — and there are examples in
India where despite lack of rainfall, people do not have to survive without
water — everyone benefits, most of all women and young girls.
So even as the monsoon
hits the southern part of this country, let us spare a thought for the children
of the other