By Nidhi Kinhal
For the people of Killabandar, a coastal village of fish workers to the north of Mumbai, finding water isn’t as easy as stepping into the bathroom and opening a tap. The female residents have to walk to a well and spend hours collecting water. The well is on public land, and it is the only source of drinking water near the village.
A photo-essay by People’s Archive of Rural India reveals that there’s more to this hardship. Since the well supports an entire locality, the water is scarce, especially in the summer. The women and girls often scrape the bottom to be able to access water. This isn’t just Killabandar; water scarcity is a huge problem in India. But Killabandar’s story tells us how inefficiently and unfairly water resources are being distributed. What its residents resent is that while they depend on wells, tankers, and the extremely erratic and unhelpful municipal supply, water from Palghar district is redirected to the Mumbai metropolitan region.
“The well has only a little water [in the summer] in one corner. It takes us half-an-hour to fill one kalshi [metal pot],” says Neelam Manbhat, one of the residents of Killabandar. While most of the 75 existing wells in and around the Vasai fort are out of commission, the taps receive water for only around one-and-a-half hours, once in two days, the villagers confess. Collecting water, ensuring availability, and performing other chores has, for a long time, been a woman’s job. In Killabandar, girls as little as 4 take up this task. “We come here every day after we are done with other chores… Yes, every day. We don’t get any holidays,” one of the women says.
It really is easy to be oblivious to such grave concerns people pull through every day, and cry urban poverty over inconveniences that matter only to a relatively privileged section of society. But the fact that we’re all part of an arrangement where cities and powerful settlements, with administrative and other resources, hog up necessities while others are deprived, needs to be accounted for. And these are gendered issues, as well.
Like PARI reports, “The need for water pushes even the youngest members – almost always girls – of many families into this daily labour.” The girls of Killabandar wake up at 7 am, some of them collect water till 10 am, and then go to school. Even municipal systems and pipelines hide realities of unfairness within them. Priya Ghtya, one of the women involved in the chores, puts it in a brutally honest manner: “You don’t have to do this. We don’t get water, you do.”