The woman in the purple sari climbs one agonising step after another, scaling up the wall of the well. At its bottom, another woman scoops a few cups of water into her bucket. This will then be hoisted by ropes by people waiting above, while she will clamber up the same perilous route, using iron level markers as steps. There is no safety net or harness.
Shot by ANI in Gusiya village, Dindori, Madhya Pradesh, the now viral video is emblematic of the water crisis staring at India in one of the hottest summers in memory.
This is not the first time that such a video has gone viral. In April this year, a video from Nashik showed women rappelling down a well and in 2019, a similar video from Maharashtra caused the usual seasonal consternation.
But, says V.K. Madhavan, CEO, Wateraid India, “We tend to talk about issues seasonally—flooding during the monsoon, water in the summer. What we need is sustained action.”
Women’s work
It’s been a harsh summer.
In Nashik, Maharashtra, women are walking 3 km a day to fetch water.
In Hinauti, northern Uttar Pradesh, Munni Adhivasi told Reuters she thought she would die in the heat as she trudges miles to bring home 30 litres of water for her family of four children and three goats.
Back in Madhya Pradesh, the handpumps in Bilhata village in the drought-prone Bundelkhand region ran dry on April 15. Women like Nanhi Gond must now undertake a perilous 2 km trek deep inside the Panna tiger reserve in search of two buckets of water, report Shruti Tomar and Anupam Pateriya for this paper.
In India, fetching water is women’s work.
It is women who require water to cook and clean. And it is women who take care of family members who might fall ill after drinking contaminated water. So it is their job to somehow find and fetch potable water.
Around the world, women spend 200 million hours a day collecting water, according to Water.org.
In India, women make up to six trips a day for water, averaging as much as 10 miles a day in searing heat.
Because India has overused its water, mainly for farming, the water table has been falling by 4 cm per year; 256 of 700 districts have reported critical or over-exploited groundwater levels, according to the Central Water Board and 600 million Indians face significant water stress.
This increasing shortage of water means that women must journey further and further away from home in search of it.
Even in cities like Delhi, where 6,25,000 households or 18% of the population, do not have access to piped water, according to the 2017 Economic Survey, it is women and children who queue up at community taps or water tanker lines.
The more time women and girls spend fetching water, the less time they have for employment and school.
Way forward
The government’s Jal Jeevan Mission aims to provide tap water to every household in rural India by 2024; at present 50% households have a connection, up from just 17% in 2019.
This, says Madhavan, has the potential to be a game-changer. “If water on tap becomes normal for every family, it will free up women’s agency in ways we cannot even imagine,” he says.
There is no shortage of public investment; what is needed is imagination. “Women must be consulted in the design and roll out of drinking water efforts in their villages and must play a role in the operation and maintenance of these systems,” he says. “This is the future.”
GENDER TRACKER
Representation of women in the Indian Foreign Service: 16%.
In leadership positions in embassies: 18%
Source: Centre for Social Research roundtable conference on gender mainstreaming in the foreign policy of India (via @jeevika_shiv).
WE HEAR YOU
“Now more than ever this is a time that we need to speak out and rewrite the dominant narratives that have landed us into quite dire straits.”
Canadian-American author, film-maker and Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozekie on winning the Women’s Prize for Fiction for her fourth novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness.
GOING PLACES
Photo Credit: Arun Singh/Gaon Connection
Aramganj village in Madhya Pradesh has just elected its first all-women panchayat with 15 of the 17 women coming from marginalised communities. Sarpanch Rajni Bai, who has studied up to class 8 and comes from the Scheduled Caste Basor community told Gaon Connection that she felt empowered and promised to lead the village administration efficiently.
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED
Decent language, please, to describe acts of indecency
Justice Rahul Chaturvedi of the Allahabad high court has advocated the use of ‘decent’ language when filing a complaint.
In the case that he was hearing, the complainant has alleged that her father-in-law had sought sexual favours from her while her brother-in-law tried to ‘ravish her physically’. She has also accused her husband of forcible sex. “In our traditional Indian family,” noted the judge, “it is highly improbable and difficult to digest the allegations of demanding sexual favours from her daughter-in-law by father-in-law or brother-in-law.”
The judge also asked for a two-month moratorium between an arrest and the filing of a complaint of cruelty by a wife. The two-month cooling off period can be used for mediation to resolve matrimonial disputes. The judge, however, clarified that this moratorium does not apply in cases where a wife has physical injuries.
She’s pregnant, not sick
After the State Bank of India (SBI), another public sector bank, Indian Bank has issued fitness guidelines for candidates applying for jobs. Women who are over three months pregnant will now be deemed ‘temporarily unfit’ to join the bank.
The All India Democratic Women’s Association has condemned the decision. “Classifying pregnancy as unfit is disgracing and dishonouring motherhood,” it said in a letter.
SBI withdrew its fitness guidelines after an uproar.
SAI’s advisory to make sport safer for women
After complaints of sexual and mental harassment from women athletes, the Sports Authority of India (SAI) has issued an exhaustive advisory to all national sports federations to ensure a safer environment. Among the steps recommended, a woman coach to accompany female athletes during domestic and international travel and a compliance officer who will report any cases of violations.
FIELD NOTES: Obstetric violence—a long and painful history
From 16th century papal Rome where Roman Catholic authorities sequestered Jewish women’s babies unless they consented to Christianisation via baptism to the Spanish empire in the Americas where priests performed forced caesarean sections and emphasised that the priority was to save the souls of foetuses and not the lives of their mothers, obstetric violence – the harm inflicted on women during and after pregnancy goes back a long way, documents this paper in The Lancet.
Obstetric violence was “at the heart of slavery which relied on the exploitation of Black women’s reproductive labour for economic profit.”
But even today, racial disparities persist in obstetric pain management, as the male-dominated field of obstetricians provide less pain treatment to Black and Latina women in the mistaken assumption that they have a higher pain threshold.
The forced sterilisation of those deemed ‘unfit’—disabled, impoverished and racially marginalised women—is another form of this persisting violence. Denial of access to abortion is another.
The paper does not look at the landscape in India where this April 2022 paper by Kaveri Mayra and others finds that “almost every woman goes through some level of disrespect and abuse during childbirth, more so in states such as Bihar where over 70% of women give birth in hospitals.”
Read The Lancet paper here.
Read Kaveri Mayra’s paper on obstetric violence in Bihar here.
AROUND THE WORLD
In China, the price of saying ‘no’
A June 10 attack on four women at a restaurant in Tangshan in the Hebei province, China, has led to a social media discussion on the need to talk about gender-based violence in a country that has a history of cracking down on feminists, arresting activists and censoring online debate.
The attack began after one of the women rejected a sexual advance by a man at a barbecue restaurant. In a video uploaded on Weibo (trigger warning: extreme violence), the woman pushes the man’s hand away but he persists. When she resists again, he begins hitting her and is soon joined by other men who can be seen dragging her out of the restaurant, stomping on her and kicking her on the head when she falls. The women who come to her rescue are also beaten. Two women had to be hospitalised for their injuries.
Chinese police are seeing the crime through the angle of gang violence and have said such crimes are a threat to ‘public safety’.
But, said an anonymous social media post, “To ignore and suppress the perspective of gender is to deny the violence that people – as women – suffer.”
Google settles
Without admitting to any wrongdoing, Google has agreed to shell out $118 million to settle a lawsuit that claims bias against women in promotions and pay. The class action suit covers over 15,000 women employees who have worked for the company since 2013.
The cost of cyber bullying just went up in Japan
In 2020, faced with a barrage of online vitriol, professional Japanese wrestler Hana Kimura died by suicide, leading to a nationwide debate on the need to bring in stricter penalties to prevent cyber bullying. Two years later on June 13, the country’s Parliament passed a bill that increases punishments for such abuse from less than 30 days to a year’s imprisonment and an enhanced fine. The statute of limitations will also be extended from one year to three, giving victims more time to file charges. The men who abused Kimura online with “you’re disgusting” and “just die” got off with a fine of just 9,000 yen (roughly Rs 5,200), reports The Straits Times.
BEFORE I GO
GoSports Foundation Karke Dikhaungi athlete scholarship programme invites applications from women and girls who dream of becoming India’s next sporting champions. The scholarship provides Rs five lakh to ten lakh to athletes and covers costs for travel, equipment, training. It is open to state and national-level women athletes. The last date to apply is June 24. The form is here.
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| That’s it for this week. If you have a tip or information on gender-related developments that you would like to share write to me at: namita.bhandare@gmail.com. |