Water

Country Water Action: India
Walking for Water

The 4-year drought in Gujarat, India 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."

The persistent drought has made life more difficult for the women of Gujarat, whose responsibility it was to fetch water for the family's use. The need to walk at least three hours daily to fetch water from a steadily diminishing source has deprived them of opportunities for education, livelihood and rest, and caused several health problems. But help came in the form of the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), a trade union of poor rural and urban women that now has 500,000 members across Gujarat. SEWA has been organizing village women since 1988, working to address the acute water and livelihood problems.

Under SEWA's influence, village women have assumed leadership and made efforts to solve their water problems. In Barara, the women decided to renovate the pond close to the village so that they can collect rainfall. In nearby Bakutra village, the women of the water committee had underground cement tanks constructed to hold drinking water brought by tanker, and this is the only source of clean water for the village.

SEWA also mobilized the women artisans in the village and helped them market their traditional embroidery and needlecrafts. This 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 crafts.

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