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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Dropping Out for a Drop of Water -Kishore Jha

Dropping Out for a Drop of Water -Kishore Jha

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published Published on Aug 25, 2014   modified Modified on Aug 25, 2014
-Economic and Political Weekly


The relationship between depleting water levels and school dropout rates is poorly studied. As chronic water shortages begin to affect more regions of the country, this trend will begin to appear more forcefully.

Kishore Jha (kishor.delhi6@gmail.com) is working on child rights with Terre des Homes, Germany.

Devender, a 14-year-old boy from Kheeda village in Almora district in Uttarakhand State, studies in Class 8. He spends at least three hours a day fetching water for his family, often missing school or reaching late due to this chore. Fetching water also eats into playtime. The small hamlet of Kheeda had two streams in the past but these water sources have vanished due to deforestation in the last few years.

Like Devender, most of the 140-odd children of Kheeda village have to spend hours fetching water every day. They all trek three and half kilometres to the Ramganga River. Most children of the village, especially girls, have dropped out of school or have irregular attendance because of this responsibility. Kheeda is not the only village where children drop out because of acute water scarcity. The story is the same in many villages of the district which is not unique to the hills.

Rinki belongs to Gauspur village in Ghazipur district of Uttar Pradesh. She stopped going to school after Class 4. The main reason was the time and effort it took her to fetch water from the river. Earlier she used to manage both. But one day while coming back from river she slipped and fractured her leg. It took a few months for her to recover and after that she never went to school. Her sister Poonam had a similar experience and does not attend school either.

Water Woes

Khoobilal Chaudhry, 85, of Gauspur tells the sad tale of the village's water woes. According to him, and other village elders, Gauspur was known in the region for its prosperity. There were five big ponds and 10 wells in this village, besides many working handpumps. Water was available at a depth of 35 feet. Today, the water table has dropped to 100-125 feet. Most wells have dried up and handpumps do not work. Digging deeper bore wells is an expensive affair.

Chaudhry says the water level started going down after electrical pumps were installed for irrigation. Farmers shifted to water-intensive cash crops and exploited water sources without thinking about the future. Water levels have dropped more than fourfold in the past 20 years. One would find a number of Rinkis and Poonams in other villages in this region as well.

The relationship between depleting water levels and school dropout rates is poorly studied, but as these empirical cases suggest, there is a correlation between the two. As chronic water shortages begin to affect more regions of the country, this trend will begin to appear more forcefully.

Depleting Water Level

India has the highest volume of groundwater overuse in the world (Barlow and Clarke 2004: 24, 64). Women in water-starved Bazargaon village in Vidarbha, Maharashtra, walk 15 km a day to fetch water (Sainath 2005). As temperature rises on account of climate change, the per capita availability of water is estimated to fall from 1,820 cubic metres per annum in 2001 to 1,140 cubic metres in 2050. The number of rainy days may fall by 15, and intensity of rain increase on the rainy days (Chattopadhyay 2008).

Changes in the environment and climate affect the basic resources such as land, water and air, which are fundamental to our survival. Seventy per cent people of India depend on land-based occupations, forests, wetlands and marine habitats. Thus, they are directly dependent on the local ecosystem for subsistence requirements of water, food, fuel, fodder and medicines. Ecological destruction directly affects lives and livelihood of these people (MOEF 2009: 73).

Environmental changes are also contributing to the current agriculture crisis. Increased uses of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, monoculture cropping and depleting level of water have resulted in reduced yield or repeated failure of crops. Large numbers of farmers have committed suicide in the last two decades and many of them are forced to migrate from their native places to work as labourers. However, in both cases, the responsibility of their village farms and other allied activities shifts to women and their children left in the village, resulting in high dropout rate in schools.

Children's Environmental Rights

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), more than 3 million children aged 0-14 die annually due to illnesses and other conditions caused by the environment. Sixty per cent of acute respiratory infections worldwide are related to environmental conditions and it is estimated that these infections cause the death of more than 2 million children under the age of five annually (WHO 2009). Climate change is projected to increase the incidence of diarrhoeal disease in low income countries by 2% to 5% by 2020. Global warming that has occurred since the 1970s caused over 1.40,000 excess deaths annually by 2004 (WHO 2012).

Depleting levels of water, water pollution and soil pollution have not only affected our access to natural resources needed for our existence, but also many other social and economic rights. They have affected children's right to education, right to protection and right to family, as demonstrated earlier. Environmental rights, often known as the third generation rights, are affecting all basic human rights including the right to survival.

As per the Indian government's State of Environment Report 2009, Food security may be at risk due to the threat of climate change leading to an increase in frequency and intensity of floods and drought, thereby affecting the production of small and marginal farms.

The report, "Mapping Hotspots of Climate Change and Food Insecurity in the Global Tropics" by Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security1 (shows regions around the world at risk of crossing certain "climate thresholds" - such as temperature too hot for maize or beans - that over the next 40 years could diminish food production. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) estimates that the production of rice and wheat could decrease by as much as 19% and 34%, respectively by 2050 due to the effects of climate change. Environmental changes are directly threatening food security and right to survival of people across the world. It is anybody's guess as to who will be hit first due to this crisis.

Conclusions

Despite the full-page advertisements highlighting the central government's efforts to protect the environment on occasions such as the Environment Day, the truth is somewhat different. Environmental protection is one of the last priorities of the government. Despite impressive growth in India, the share of the country's budget going directly into environmental work and regulation remained below 1%. There have been 30 changes by the government, mostly dilutions, of notifications related to environment impact assessment in the last decade or so (Shrivastava and Kothari 2012: 4).

There is a general perception that we, as a society, are polluting our environment and disturbing our ecological balance, and hence, we pay the price collectively. This is a false assumption. It is important to understand who is responsible for this crisis and who is paying the price. The per capita ecological footprint of the wealthiest 0.1% in India is 330 times that of the poorest 40% of Indians. The footprint of the wealthiest 1% Indians is 17 times greater than the poorest 40% (Shrivastava and Kothari 2012). If we compare the carbon footprint of the wealthiest from a first world country and the poorest from the third world, the results will be even more striking. The first world countries such as the United States have categorically refused to change their lifestyle to bring down the carbon emission even after making a commitment towards the Kyoto Protocol.

Thousands of children who are not able to attend school due to water crisis and thousands of children are dying every year because of environmental changes belong to the poorest 40% whose carbon footprint is negligible. Hence it is not true that we are collectively polluting our environment and collectively paying the price. The fact is that the larger section of the society is paying the price for the wasteful and self-indulgent lifestyle of minute section.

Note

1 Press release on 3 June 2011 available at: http://ccafs.cgiar.org/publications/mapping-hotspots- climate-change-and-food-insecurity-global-tropics#.U4cjEXKSzfI

References

Barlow, Maude and Tony Clarke (2004): Blue Gold (New Delhi: Left Word Books).

Chattopadhyay, N (2008): "Climate Change and Food Security in India", International Symposium on Climate Change and Food Security in South Asia, Dhaka, 25-30 August.

MoEF (2009): State of Environment Report: 2009 India (New Delhi: Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India).

Sainath, P (2005): "Dry Villages and Lush Water Parks", The Hindu, 22 June.

Shrivastava, Aseem and Ashish Kothari (2012): Globalisation in India (New Delhi: Kalpavriksha).

WHO (2009): Global Action Plan for Children's Health and Environment on the basis of the Third WHO International Conference on Children's Health and the Environment in Busan, Republic of Korea, June, World Health Organisation, available at: http://www.who.int/ceh/global_plan/en/

- (2012): "Climate Change and Health", Fact Sheet, 266, available at: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs266/en/

Economic and Political Weekly, Vol-XLIX, No. 34, August 23, 2014, http://www.epw.in/commentary/dropping-out-drop-water.html


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