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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | The long walk to water -Prabhat Singh

The long walk to water -Prabhat Singh

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published Published on May 1, 2015   modified Modified on May 1, 2015
-Livemint.com

Despite improvements over the past few years, accessing clean water is a big challenge in rural India

Women in Indian villages have borne the brunt of water scarcity for a long time. Tales of young women missing out on school or college to fetch water for their families are common across the Indian countryside even today. But then there are extreme examples, such as the village of Denganmal, 150 kilometres from Mumbai. In this village, whose story was featured in an article by the Open magazine, men marry a second—sometimes even a third—woman whose only role is to fetch water for the family by making arduous 3 km-long treks several times a day.

While Denganmal may be an exception, securing even the minimum amount of water for their everyday needs is a daily struggle for a large section of rural India. In the absence of public water supplies, rural households have come to depend on privately-extracted groundwater for 85% of their needs.

Water security for rural India is measured on the following parameters: quantity, accessibility and quality. If water is found lacking on one or more of these, water security is compromised.

According to the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) estimates, 14% of the households reported shortage of drinking water at some point during the year. But the situation isn’t rosy for those which didn’t. The accessibility of drinking water, measured by time taken to fetch it and the distance to its source, is a serious issue. In some regions where accessibility has improved, the deteriorating water quality remains a concern.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines, drinking water that lies more than 30 minutes away is considered inaccessible. Even though the nationwide average is below this limit, drinking water remains inaccessible in states such as Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Bihar. Lack of regular water supply forces people to store water. Such storage units often turn into breeding grounds for mosquitoes, which spread diseases such as dengue and malaria.

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Livemint.com, 29 April, 2015, http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/P0Z53BOwcPw4SjMRnm028L/The-long-walk-to-water.html


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