Leading a Push for Clean Water

NEW DELHI - The protesters were chiefly women, but instead of placards, they brought empty pots. The vessels brandished by the roughly 100 women at the protest last month at a government office in Tiruchirappalli, in Tamil Nadu State, of plastic, brass or earthenware, were what they use to collect their households' daily supply of water.

The women were there to ask the government officials to fix the water pipes in their area. The taps had run dry four days earlier, forcing them to buy relatively expensive water from private tankers. Water shortages are endemic in India in the hot months and can turn into far more lethal droughts. But that the protesters were mostly women was a reflection of the fact that, in India and in some other parts of the world, like sub-Saharan Africa, water collection and management is women's work.

As the heat and dust sweep over the plains of the Subcontinent, dragging large swaths of the country into the long dry months of summer, women bear the brunt of water management. But they are also crucial to any significant improvements in the water supply.

The involvement of women in initiatives like the pani panchayat, or water councils, in rural India, for instance, has been crucial to ensuring more reliable sources of drinking water. Set up by nongovernmental groups, the water councils bring together women from villages and small towns to lobby district officials for better pipelines and cleaner drinking water. Often, the women also learn about traditional ways of obtaining water, like collecting rain, or campaign to get the local municipality to clean up old wells and other water sources.

In a 2012 working paper for the National Council of Applied Economic Research, an independent research group, the economists Hans Binswanger-Mkhize, Sharmistha Nag, Hari K. Nagarajan, Kailash C. Pradhan, and Sudhir Singh estimated the time rural women typically devote to securing water at 22 percent of their working day, which they wrote “represents a significant relatively unproductive component of their work time.”

Though the Indian government has built pipelines and undertaken other water management projects, it has not been able to guarantee all citizens access to clean water. A combination of apathy among officials at the state level, degradation of the environment and the abandonment of traditional methods of water collection and storage has meant that water remains a scarce resource in much of the country.

According to a 2004 study, “Women as Policy Makers,” by Raghabendra Chattopadhyay and Esther Duflo, the men who dominate public policy decision-making have different priorities. The researchers analyzed two states where villages often lack pipelines, let alone taps, and draw their water from distant ponds or wells: West Bengal and Rajasthan. Though men and women both wanted better roads, drinking water and education, men, who tend to travel more, ranked roads first, while women emphasized water.

Arati Kumar-Rao, a photographer who recently spent several weeks studying water collection in the villages of western Rajasthan, came back with a nuanced view of what that daily chore means to women who live in one of India's hottest states.

“Water is treated with reverence,” she said in an interview. “They don't take it for granted.”

Some villages have access to piped water from the Indira Gandhi Canal, Ms. Kumar-Rao said, but they draw their drinking water from traditional wells, which they consider safer.

“They understand the cycles, how to find it, tap it, at the base of sand dunes, how to read the signals in the desert,” she said. “Water is not a commodity, not seen as a resource. It's a living, breathing part of their lives.”

The women she met dealt with the long hours that it takes to fetch water by treating this chore not as drudgery but as a social activity.

“There's a lot of laughing, a lot of banter,” she said. “When they go to get water, they make it a happy occasion.”

But there remains the opportunity cost, measured by the activities women cannot engage in if their days revolve around water collection.

And in urban areas, particularly slums, obtaining water - especially safe sources of drinking water - can be a constant struggle. News reports about water shortages in urban slums tend to focus on the quarrels, sometimes deadly, that break out in the long lines for tap water or for toilets.

The lack of toilets affects women, in particular, at two levels. It is a major reason that girls drop out of school. And women who have to walk farther to find a toilet, in both urban and rural areas, are often at risk of being sexually harassed or assaulted.

There are extra monetary costs as well, as Ramnath Subbaraman, a global health expert, and his colleagues found in their 2013 study of the Kaula Bandar slum in Bombay. When water is unavailable as a public service, residents must obtain their water from private companies, which send out tankers and charge much more.

“Depending on season,” they said, “households spend an average of 52 to 206 times more than the standard municipal charge of Indian rupees 2.25 (4 cents) per 1,000 liters for water.” In dry periods, they found, 95 percent of households do not have the 50 liters per person per day recommended by the World Health Organization for all uses.

Combine these factors - forgone wages, poor security, extra fees - and the true burden of water provision on Indian women starts to become clear.

In 2012, the environmental magazine Down to Earth reported on a significant development from the previous year: Women from 60 village councils in Bundelkhand, in the populous state of Uttar Pradesh, had established water councils. The pani panchayat idea - forming separate bodies in villages, run chiefly by women, to secure better access to water - dates from the 1970s in Maharashtra, but it is only recently that water councils have spread to other states.

By September 2011, the number of councils in Bundelkhand - led mostly by women from the Dalit caste, one of the most oppressed castes in India - had grown to 96. They had more than 3,000 female workers, had brought in hand pumps and restored old wells.

The classic image of India in summer - the photographer's cliché of a line of women walking across parched earth with water pots perched on their heads - might persist. But now in Uttar Pradesh, and elsewhere, women are learning a new term, one the water councils use to describe a member trained in water storage and conservation - “jal saheli,” or a “friend of water.” Perhaps in time, the idea that a woman's work involves walking for half the day to carry the water her family needs for the other half will finally be put to rest.

A version of this article appeared in print on May 22, 2013, in The International Herald Tribune.