The women’s issue that has recently grabbed headlines is whether or not women can redefine the uniform in an educational context. There have been several framings of the hijab issue in Karnataka; ranging from one of freedom of choice/expression/religion, to one of preventing girls from learning. One Nobel Laureate has even tweeted, “Refusing to let girls go to school in their hijabs is horrifying.”
Let us expand this a little. Anything preventing girls from going to school or work is not good. It’s not good because girls going to school and young women working has been associated with almost every positive social outcome. Unequivocally, it’s a good thing for a country to aspire to.
And in getting women to work, India can do better. India’s female workforce participation rate—or how many women who can work, do—was lower than that of Afghanistan until the Taliban took over. In 2020, at 19%, it was amongst the lowest in the world—lower than even that of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Disturbingly, this is the overall female workforce participation rate—an even smaller percentage of urban Indian women work, and the percentage of women choosing to work is falling. Top reasons cited for not working are security, cultural reasons and, importantly, balancing home and work (this resonates with me because most of the workforce of the companies I help manage is female). Indeed, a recent study has shown that balancing pressures at home with work may be the most important in determining whether women work, and girls can go to school.
This brings us to managing water, an important force dialling up home pressures. Consider what havoc unmanaged water can wreak.
Alwar, in Rajasthan, is one of the hottest places in the world—in 1956, it recorded India’s then maximum recorded temperature of 50.6°C, which remain uneclipsed until 2016. Alwar is also dry, getting about 625 mm of rainfall a year (about half of India’s average)—mostly during the monsoon. Decades ago, it was so hot and so dry, that Alwar’s farming economy collapsed, and menfolk started leaving to find work outside, while Alwar’s girls skipped school to help their mothers fetch water. In the early-1980s, it looked as though Alwar would become a climate victim—too hot, and too dry to live in.
That’s when, in 1984, a young doctor named Rajendra Singh and a few of his friends arrived in Alwar district wanting to help. They initially focused on education—trying to get more of the children to school, and treating night-blindness, Rajendra Singh told me decades later. But he found the villagers unresponsive. Their problem, they told him, was water. That’s what they needed. And so, he listened, and learned and worked with a couple of villagers to rejuvenate one of the giant water-harvesting structures of the region—the Johad.
The Johad worked, and the local wells began to fill up. Over the following decades, young Rajendra and the organization he founded, Tarun Bhagat Sangh (TBS), worked with the communities in over a thousand villages to rejuvenate over 8,600 Johads. Their work brought back rivers to life. And the children, especially the girls, began going to school again. In 2013, a study undertaken by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency found that after the work of TBS, more girls began to go to school in Alwar (30-50 percent more) and the age of marriage for women rose from 18 years to about 23 years. Few forces can rival well-managed water in empowering women.
Sadly, across the length and breadth of India, women and girls wage a daily battle for water—one collateral victim of this battle is lower attendance for girls in school. Census 2011 data show that people in more than a third of rural Indian households walked up to half-a-kilometre to collect water. This may not seem like a lot to some, but imagine this journey carrying pots of water weighing 20 kilograms several times a day. Nearly 20 percent of the householders walk even further than that.
In one Maharashtrian hamlet (ironically a few kilometres away from a giant dam that supplies Mumbai with drinking water), women even rappel down a deep well and wait for hours to gather water in the summers. Just think—these girls are walking to the well, rappelling down, waiting for hours for the water to ooze out, then clamber up with precious water to their homes. Imagine how much school these girls miss.
There is good news—India has made great strides in getting her girls to finish lower secondary school (from less than 30 percent in the 1980s, to over 85 percent today). Further good news is that the Jal Jeevan Mission is a meaningful step in getting water to homes. While the progress in terms of providing connections has gone forward at a breath-taking pace, some question how effectively India’s volatile water can be brought to those taps especially in the summers or during a drought. When I checked in February 2022, the Jal Jeevan website stated that the mission had not begun in Take Deogaon, the panchayat where women rappel for their water.
But poorly managed water impacts schooling in other ways. Waterborne diseases affect young children especially because their immune systems are developing. Apart from a tragic loss of life, 443 million school days are lost due to waterborne diseases in India every year. Yet more schooling is lost when regions flood with distressing regularity during the monsoon. Mismanaged water is an important culprit in preventing children from attending school, and yet, using Google search interest as a proxy for public interest, we appear to be far more interested in caste or hijabs rather than in our water problem.
Next, consider the evidence from voter surveys. The Association for Democratic Reforms, an organization started by a group of IIM-Ahmedabad professors with a goal of helping the Indian voter make more informed voting choices, conducts periodic surveys to understand what voters value and what are factors matter in their voting choices. In their 2018 survey, they spoke to over 273,000 voters and found out that while water is important in governance priorities, voters cast their vote based on the candidate, the party, religion, caste and cash/ other freebies.
To gauge if water mattered at all in voting choices, Sundaram Climate Institute surveyed over 900 people to conclude not much (indeed other studies have shown that voters do not reward development projects). To nuance this depressing conclusion, while studying the political economy of water, I found that while Indian voters may reward water provision, they are unlikely to cast their vote for policies encouraging water management.
Without managing India’s volatile water, building water resilience remains a pipe dream. The factors that voters cast their vote on are the factors that grab headlines, the factors that lead to outrage, the factors that can lead to change. In women’s education and employment, by relegating water management to the side-lines, we impede true progress. What does that say about us?
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