Families, especially women and girls, spend long hours collecting water from local water sources.
October 2005
Colorful trucks overloaded with pots and fruits, furniture and people rumble along the crowded early morning streets of Vijayawada. We are off to visit one of the WaterHealth International (WHI) plants about two hours out of this small industrial city in Andhra Pradesh. Women walk with pots of water tucked under arms covered with colorful bangles. Others carry metal pots on their heads. Morning is the time for fetching water. Three wheelers and bicycles compete audaciously in a dangerous ongoing game of chicken with the big bully vans and trucks.
The city is compact, so that the streets quickly thin and we find ourselves driving on a narrow road lined with palm trees and green fields as far as the eye can see. Thatched huts dot the land and every so often we come across women in saris of fuchsia or lime green fluttering against the blue sky. Potholes riddle the road and we weave carefully from side to side. And then the road is smooth again, though I doubt we ever exceed 30 mph as we pass bicycles, people and cows. Women lay brightly colored clothes newly washed on flat rocks to dry in the sun. A white ambassador whose hood is decked with yellow marigolds filled with old men and women putters along, nodding to the past.
We reach a small town. The street is narrow and even more crowded than Vijayawada. All along the sides are small shops for selling grains, and flour, fertilizer and rice, sundries. Men push carts of bananas and bangles. A skinny old man drives a bicycle with four chickens hanging off the handle bars. Beggars sit outside a tiny temple, hands outstretched. Waiting.
After a two-hour drive, we enter the panchayat area, moving along a single road toward clusters of houses. In the distance, you can see the WHI structure - an alien-looking diamond-shaped dome colored electric blue. I could see the notion that the system is supposed to be a thing of beauty, but somehow this design simply doesn't translate - and WHI agrees. Nonetheless, the center is a hub of activity. People come to the site with all sorts of transport. Boys come forward with a single plastic container and fill it from one of the three taps. Young men come on motorbikes and bicycles, rickshaws and three wheelers.
The most surprising element of the morning is that there are no women at the center to gather the water despite their being the traditional carriers. The men's reason for this is that the women lived too far from the center to carry the heavy containers; and most men have bicycles or motorbikes. I wonder if the change is also due to water moving from a free commodity to a thing of value, something paid for. Women still go to the wells for washing, but not to the water center. We need to understand these gender dynamics, need to consider the reasons for the changes in responsibility - and the impact on women's lives.
A poultry farmer arrives. With a big, intelligent smile, he explains that he buys on average 10 containers a day. He gives the water to his chickens - about 7,000 of them, which is a big jump since the 5,000 he was raising before using the clean water. The clean water removes his need for medicines and his chickens grow about 20% quicker so he can turn them over for sale in 40 as opposed to 50 days. Now he wants to bring a pipe to carry the water directly to his farm.
WHI explains they couldn't consider piping water at this point. It is too easily contaminated, they say, too easy for people to steal water by drilling into the pipes for their own purposes. The farmer isn't convinced. He said he would pay for it, protect it, take care of it. The group asks him to think about purchasing a water storage unit instead - or at least as an intermediate step. This would allow him to control flow and reduce time spent carrying water. I was struck by his entrepreneurial spirit, by his seeing himself as the large and important customer he is, by how much his life has changed through this.
Dignity. Again and again, the real change comes when people can access the resources that enable them to solve their own problems and create greater choice in their lives.