18th March 2012

Women carry water, men make decisions

After walking for over a mile in the scorching heat with two water pitchers balanced perfectly on her head, Hasti, 32, reaches home exhausted. Entering her home in village Bagio, Tharp

Besides fetching water, Hasti’s daily chores include collecting firewood, cooking meals and taking care of her four children and attending to her husband’s elderly parents. Although water is not generously used, for a family of eight, she makes seven or eight trips to the well per day. This burden is hardly ever shared by the two men in her house.arkar, she pours water into two buckets and prepares herself for the next trip. This chore is repeated every day starting as early as 4am when her family and her husband are fast asleep.

Like Hasti, women and girls in Thar spend three to four hours every day to provide water for their families on a daily basis for cooking, bathing, cleaning, maintaining health and hygiene, raising small livestock and growing food.

“Wells are few and quite deep. It takes time to get your turn. There’s a lot of waiting involved. In fact the entire process of pulling each bucket of water from the deep well is time consuming and laborious,’ she explains.

“It doesn’t matter if you are sick or going through the last days of your pregnancy, you still have to fetch water. It’s never been a man’s job. I lost my child some two years ago due to lifting heavy weight,” says Haribai, 39, from the Kohli community.

Even if they survive childbirth, they risk infection and even death because of the conditions in which they live in and deliver, says Dr Ramesh Kumar working in Nagarparkar, for Participatory Village Development (PVDP), a non-governmental organisation.

“The situation is aggravated due to lack of supplementary diet and malnutrition. Women are last to eat and get the least. Work is severe. The minorities are worst hit and most deprived due to abject poverty,” adds Kumar.

Impact of better access to water on women’s health, workload and allocation of time cannot be over emphasised. In fact access to water for household consumption is interpreted as ‘a gain in the productivity of domestic labour time’. However, gender roles in relation to water use remain unchanged, particularly in rural areas.

In South Asian culture, much of women’s suffering can be attributed to water and its lack of availability, limited or hazardous access and poor quality, all of which affect their mental, emotional, physical and reproductive health.

Water is very important to women as they are the collectors, users and managers of water in the household and at times farmers of irrigated and rain-fed crops. Because of these roles, women have considerable knowledge about water resources, including quality and reliability, restrictions and acceptable storage methods, says Shabina Gulzar, District Coordinator, Citizens Engagement for Social Service Delivery (CESSD).

Projects designed and run with the full participation of women are more sustainable and effective. In some cases, women lack exposure to science and technology, an area that needs to be bolstered. It is time to focus on women’s equal participation also in decision making regarding water and sanitation. We need to build their capacity on technical know-how, says Gulzar, who works in the water sector.

On the September 30, 2010 United Nations affirmed access to water and sanitation as a human right. World Development Report (WDR) 2012 titled Gender Equality and Development, emphasises that countries in South Asia have shown that ‘giving power to women at the local level led to increase in the provision of public goods, such as water and sanitation, which mattered more to women. – By Huma Khawar

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