Water

Country Water Action: India
Walking for Water
This article was adapted from the documentary film "Walking for Water" from the Water Voices Documentary Series

People rise early in the desert areas of Kutch, at 4:30 or 5 a.m. It is still cold. Fires are lit. The men warm their hands. The women start a ceaseless round of domestic work that won't end till well after nightfall. On the fringe of the desert, in the State of Gujarat in India, live the Ahir people. They are said to be direct descendants of Lord Krishna. Once nomadic, the Ahir settled in this arid region, growing crops of cotton, maize and barley - if there was rain.

For these desert villages of Banaskantha District, water has always been the key problem. It's to be caught during the brief rains of August, and held by earth walled check dams, creating ponds to last the villages through the long dry months. Normally every second year is a drought year but for the past four years the region has had hardly a drop of rain. To make matters worse, a severe earthquake devastated the region in 2000. Scars are still visible in the villages-- the quake destroyed many of the houses and much of the water infrastructure.

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The State if Gujarat is facing a major water crisis, says Mr.K. Kailashnathan, chairman of the Gujarat Water Supply & Sewerage Board. "As the years passed by, the water tables have gone down in terms of quantity, and water quality gets affected the deeper you go to extract groundwater."

The persistent drought has caused widespread crop failures, increasing hardship and poverty of the farmers, says Gauriben, a woman who heads the Bakutra village watershed committee: "We have farms but we can't grow any crops. Normally a crop would earn us 20 to 25,000 rupees. It didn't rain, so nothing would grow in the fields. Then we had some rain, so we spent the last of our savings buying seeds. We worked very hard and sowed the seeds but then the drought came and everything got scorched. So as well as having no income, we had lost all our savings."

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The job of fetching water for family use falls to the women and children. Carrying multiple pots stacked on their heads for long distances, village women often spend 4 hours each day collecting water.

"Women need water the most", says Kakuben from Barara village. "When it's scarce, our whole time is wasted just searching for it. There has been no rain for the last 4 years. There are 3 very essential things for life - food, water, and housing. Without these, life is not possible. We had to walk 3 to 4 kilometers out of the village to fetch water, carrying it on our heads. Some women couldn't lift such big, heavy pots onto their heads, they could only carry one small pot full and they were very upset about this. We used to waste 3 to 4 hours to fill one jar, and you need at least 2 jars for the household chores."

Both Gauriben and Kakuben are local leaders of the Self Employed Woman's Association (SEWA), a trade union of poor rural and urban women that now has 500,000 members across Gujarat. SEWA has been organizing women in the villages of Banaskantha since 1988, working to address the acute water and livelihood problems. Under SEWA's influence, village women have learned new skills and began to take leadership to try to solve the water problems.

Despite some resistance from their menfolk, the women of Barara dominate the village water committee that meets regularly to decide water management issues.

"It's the women who know how important it is to have clean water, says Kakuben. "Men have no idea of how safe water should be. My husband will just say -- bring water, I want to have a bath. So I have to bring him water. He commands me to bring him water to drink or to serve to guests, which I just have to do. I can't say no to him."

Kakuben was the first president of the watershed committee in Barara, explains Reema Nanavaty, director of SEWA's Rural Development Program. "When the village was not cooperating, she took up the challenge and the leadership and that's how she made the village watershed committee work well."

In Barara, the women decided to renovate the pond close to the village. Kakuben describes what they did: "I saw that in some places people were constructing watersheds. So we said we should also have these watersheds here. If we have water close by, women in the village will not have to go so far to fetch water. Previously, when the rains come, it would just drain away. But now, we can collect it in the catchment area. Women supervise all the work that has to be done."

In nearby Bakutra village, Gauriben, and the women of the water committee came up with their own initiative to solve the water problem. They had underground cement tanks constructed to hold drinking water brought by tanker. This is the only source of clean water for the village. There is a water pipe coming from the government bore well in the village but the pipe is usually dry.

"This tank is our own tank so women here have started to understand that this is our own water," says Gauriben. "Before, they used to fight for the water. We used to walk 6 kilometers for the water. The pipeline water comes today and won't come tomorrow, because sometimes there is a power shortage and often those hotel people divert the water from the pipeline for their own use."

Says SEWA's Reema Nanavaty: "Gauriben is a strong leader. She has an inner drive and she's been with SEWA almost 12 years. In her village she has displayed a lot of leadership in taking up the rainwater harvesting program, taking up the watershed development and mobilizing the artisans in her villages."

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Mobilizing the women artisans of Bakutra, Barara and other nearby communities proved to be the decisive move which turned things round for the drought-stricken villages. Now that the daily burden of fetching water has been eased, more time is available for the women to devote to livelihood activities based on their traditional Ahir crafts. Ahir girls learn the intricate needlecraft from a young age, sewing garments to prepare for their wedding. "Our ancestors have been doing this sort of emboridery for 500 to 700 years", explains Gauriben. "We learned by watching our mothers sewing when we were small, and then we would try to do it like them."

SEWA came up with the idea of a marketing cooperative to fetch a better price for the embroidery. It began eleven years ago when SEWA organized an exhibit of the women's embroidery in Delhi. Everything was sold. The women then realized that their work was worth a lot of money.

"That experience gave us the confidence that craft could be developed as an economic program so we started organizing these women water users into artisan groups", explains Reema Nanavaty.

SEWA started with a group of fifty women artisans from the villages. Now this has grown to almost 15,000 today. Crafts from Banaskantha are trucked to SEWA warehouses in Ahmedabad, and from there distributed to shops all over the world. The craft has become the major source of income and livelihood for many families in that area.

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The women of Banaskantha have become deeply involved in finding solutions to their severe water problems. In the process they are improving the lives of their families and they are changing themselves.

Gauriben sums it up this way: "Women's work used to be of no value. A man could wander around all day doing nothing and it wouldn't matter, but no matter how much hard work we women did, it was as if we didn't exist. Now we get our pay, and we are respected. Our lives have improved and we feel like we have been born again. Since we started selling our embroidery work, we have learned about a lot of things. Now the world has come to know that the women from the SEWA communities work hard and from this we have gained recognition. It has not been easy. It has been hard work but we have accomplished a lot."