As the monsoon storms bear down on India, a dedicated group of women hope that after years of backbreaking labor, water shortages will no longer leave their village high and dry.
The world’s second-most populous country is struggling to meet the water needs of its 1.4 billion people — a problem worsening as climate change makes weather patterns more unpredictable. Few places have it tougher than Bundelkhand, a region south of the Taj Mahal, where scarce water supplies have pushed despairing farmers on the plains to give up their lands and take up precarious work in the cities.
“Our elders say that this stream used to run full throughout the year, but now there is not a single drop,” said Babita Rajput while walking past a bone-dry fissure in the earth near her village.
Photo: AFP
“There is a water crisis in our area,” she added. “All our wells have dried up.”
Three years ago, Rajput joined Jal Saheli (“Friends of Water”), a volunteer network of around 1,000 women working across Bundelkhand to rehabilitate and revive disappeared water sources. Together they carry rocks and mix concrete to build dams, ponds and embankments to catch the fruits of the June monsoon, a season which accounts for about 75 percent of India’s annual rainfall.
Agrotha, where Rajput lives, is one of more than 300 villages where women are chalking out plans for new catchment sites, reservoirs and waterway revitalizations. Rajput said their work had helped them retain monsoon rainwater for longer and revive half a dozen water bodies around their village.
Photo: AFP
Though not yet self-sufficient, Agrotha’s residents are no longer among the roughly 600 million Indians that a government think-tank says face acute water shortages daily. The women’s efforts provide a rare glimmer of hope as national shortages worsen.
Water utilities in the capital New Delhi fail to meet demand in summer, with trucks regularly traveling into slums to supply residents unable to draw water from their taps.
India’s NITI Aayog public policy centre forecasts that around 40 percent of the country’s population could be without access to drinking water by the end of the decade.
‘GOVERNMENT HAS FAILED’
Erratic rainfall patterns and extreme heat have been linked to climate change in Bundelkhand, which has suffered several long dry spells since a drought was declared at the turn of the century.
Civil society activist Sanjay Singh helped train women in Agrotha to harvest and store rainwater after the surrounding land was desiccated by drought.
By doing so he helped the village rediscover knowledge that was lost decades earlier, when water went from being a community-managed resource to one administered by India’s government.
“But government has failed to ensure water to every citizen, particularly in rural areas, pushing villagers to go back to the old practice,” he said.
Before Agrotha’s irrigation project began, women had to walk miles every day in a desperate and often fruitless search for a well that was not dry.
In India’s villages, fetching water is traditionally the responsibility of women, several of whom have faced violence from their husbands after being unable to find enough for their households, Singh said. He added that drought had brought big social changes to the region, pushing men to move to cities and leave their families behind. But since it was founded in 2005, the Jal Saheli initiative has helped more than 110 villages become self-reliant for their water needs and aided in reversing the outward flow of people.
DUST BOWL TO OASIS
In the nearby Lalitpur district, the elderly Srikumar has seen the initiative transform her community from a dust bowl into an oasis.
She heard about the volunteer group a decade ago after suffering through years of water shortages, by the end of which every well and hand pump in her village of 500 people had run dry. Most of the farms in the area had turned barren because of a lack of irrigation, and dehydrated cattle herds were dying in summer temperatures close to 50 degrees Celsius.
“Villagers suffered a lot during those days,” Srikumar said. “Farming was impossible and men were fleeing their homes to cities to earn a living.”
With the help of Singh’s charity, Srikumar and a dozen other volunteers dug a football field-sized reservoir near the village that holds up to three meters of water after the monsoon rains arrive.
The village now has enough water reserves to meet its needs year-round and replenish the earth that had dried out before their intervention.
“Things have changed for good. We have enough water now, not just for our homes but also for our cattle,” she said. “Our lives would have been miserable without this pond,” she added. “It would have been very difficult to survive.”
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
Six weeks before I embarked on a research mission in Kyoto, I was sitting alone at a bar counter in Melbourne. Next to me, a woman was bragging loudly to a friend: She, too, was heading to Kyoto, I quickly discerned. Except her trip was in four months. And she’d just pulled an all-nighter booking restaurant reservations. As I snooped on the conversation, I broke out in a sweat, panicking because I’d yet to secure a single table. Then I remembered: Eating well in Japan is absolutely not something to lose sleep over. It’s true that the best-known institutions book up faster