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INDIA - WOMEN & GIRLS AS WATER
CARRIERS - DROUGHT DEVASTATION - PARCHED LIVES
By Kalpana Sharma - The Hindu - June
10, 2012
The plight of women and girls as water carriers. (Mahesh
Harilal)
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