Shared work, shared water:
cooperation eases extreme heat, drought risk for Indian women
By Roli Srivastava
In drought-prone Bhagatpur, a rural village in the eastern Indian state of Odisha, temperatures have already hit 42.7 degrees Celsius (109 degrees Fahrenheit) in early April, well before the peak of summer.
But farmer Pari Sahu is less worried than she once would have been. On her one-acre farm, she shows off pumpkins catching the early morning sunlight, cabbages bigger than footballs rising from the dark, damp soil and green eggplants hidden behind lush foliage.
Nearby, a pump hums, pulling water from a neighbor’s well onto Sahu’s plot and feeding her crops - the result of an unusual community effort, backed by women, to boost water security and to make water a shared communal right and responsibility, even when it lies on private land.
Before the changes, “I would stand in long queues for water at the well. Everyone would crowd around it and fights broke out a few times,” remembers Sahu, 42, who has had to carry home buckets of water for cooking and bathing much of her married life.
But her village of 135 households - which once had just two wells that ran dry almost every year between March and June or July - now has relatively abundant water, and easier lives for women who face growing stresses from extreme heat and drought.
“It is all solved now,” Sahu said of the community’s water situation, throwing a switch to set water flowing to her crops.
HOTTER AND DRYER
Heat extremes are coming earlier and more frequently across many parts of India as climate changing emissions continue to rise globally, creating growing risks and burdens, particularly for women and others already dealing with drought.
India, the world’s most populous country, is one of the most water-stressed. Agricultural production is mainly dependent on monsoons that have become less predictable, hurting yields or destroying entire crops. As men look for alternative work outside their failing farms, women are often left behind to manage households and parched fields.
In many places, that involves long walks or waits for scarce water, often under the scorching sun in a state where March to June temperatures can hit 45 degrees Celsius, according to the Odisha state climate action plan.
“I spent four hours a day fetching water, at least 40 buckets a day. I would get tired, but the family needed water. I would wake up at 5 a.m.,” remembers Saudamini Pradhan, who also lives in Bhagatpur.
“I would even get a fever during the summer months. But where was the choice? We had to do it,” the 42-year-old added.
But today Bhagatpur has white and pale orange water pipes snaking through its roads and alleys, connecting homes like Pradhan’s to some of the 70 working wells in the village.
With their own labor, villagers have excavated silted-in farm ponds, dug new ones, created contouring to hold and direct water and dug trenches and percolation areas to allow captured rainwater to soak into the land, boosting once-falling groundwater levels.
Most of the construction work happened on privately owned land - but villagers agreed that Bhagatpur’s water was now a communally held asset that all could access and that all would be responsible for protecting and using responsibly, in line with existing communal ownership of the village orchard and pastureland.
“Water is gold for the rural community. The more water you have, the better your chances of making more money,” said Swapna Sarangi, the head of gender, diversity and inclusion at the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), a nonprofit that helped Bhagatpur develop its new water system.
“Men weigh everything in profit and loss. For women, water is water. They share,” added Sarangi, who is based in the nearby city of Angul and helped lead Bhagatpur’s water regeneration project.
LOCAL LABOR
The water security project - one of 40 in villages across Angul district in Odisha - received much of its funding from the National Bank for Agricultural and Rural Development (NABARD), India’s key development bank, which aimed to improve water access in the parched district.
But local people provided the labour - an estimated 16 percent of the effort’s total cost - and Bhagatpur’s women, who had infrequently taken formal leadership roles in the community in the past, were asked to help with the plans as they “had the most experience of farming and the hardship involved in fetching water,” Sarangi said.
Once the new structures were in place, a watershed governance committee was set up in Bhagatpur, with a one-time bank deposit of about 500,000 ($5,800) provided by NABARD combined with about 250,000 rupees ($3,000) in local contributions to fund perpetual repairs and maintenance.
But Bhagatpur’s villagers, encouraged by the improvement in water access and rising farming incomes as a result, have since the end of the formal construction project gone on to excavate more ponds and dig more wells, adding 15 farm ponds and percolation tanks in the last four years.
The village that once relied on two wells now has 70, as well as 30 ponds and tanks. It also has instituted rules on water use to prevent excessive extraction.
“Our farm yields have improved in the past three to four years. Whatever we are growing, we are able to sell. And there is no water crisis now,” said Sahu.
Bhagatpur today attracts traders from the state capital of Bhubaneshwar, four hours away, with trucks lining up each week at the village farm gate to buy the plentiful fresh produce. A rectangular cold storage box now sits in the village where farmers stock their excess cabbage, tomatoes and eggplants until the traders come.
Sahu, like other villagers with small farms, makes about 5000 rupees ($58) a month from vegetable sales, supplementing her household income in a community largely dependent on the earnings of migrant husbands.
Families also now grow more of their own food, cutting food purchase costs. Houses in the village are undergoing expansion and parents - none of whom have studied beyond the ninth grade - are investing in their children’s education, with at least 10 children now going to college, residents said.
“My biggest achievement is my farm. I have food in the kitchen at all times. My children are eating healthy. And my income is helping their education,” Pradhan said.
indoor cooling
The improved water infrastructure is also helping women deal with worsening extreme heat in ways beyond cutting their need to find and carry once-scarce water in scorching temperatures.
Pradhan and her husband Madan own a water cooler, which uses a fan blowing over a tank of pumped-in cool water to reduce indoor temperatures in very hot periods.
Before, to make the cooler work, Pradhan had to carry water to fill the tank, a sweaty task. Now a water pipe delivers cool water effortlessly from a well.
“We used to be tense if we switched on the cooler - it was using water,” her husband said. “But now we are not worried.”
This story has been co-published with The Migration Story.