A man looks for drinking water in western Gujarat - and this is what he can find. Photograph from Utthaan archives.

Nafisa Barot, a leading activist working on water issues in Gujarat, with a focus on gender issues, is currently traveling through various cities in the USA. During her visit to the Twin Cities, we caught up with her. In two parts, we present her experiences and insights on water and on communal fragmentation of the Indian society, especially from a gender perspective.

Nafisa Barot is the director of Utthan, a volunteer organization working in saline coastal and Adivasi areas of Gujarat that have been impacted by the earthquake, salinity, drought and more recently, by communal conflict. Nafisa graduated with a Master of Science in Nutrition from the University of Baroda. As a child, having grown up in villages in Gujarat and interacting with people who lived in impoverished situations, Nafisa was inspired to initiate change and help people rise above their environment. She and three other women started Utthan, a non-governmental organization, in 1981.

Founded in 1981, the first phase of Utthan's work began in area called Bhal, which suffers from a hostile geo-climatic environment, highly saline shallow ground water, erratic monsoon rains, exploitation of poor by high castes, and migration. Utthan supported the emergence of a community-based group called Mahiti. These two groups together organized women in the community around the issue of access to safe and regular supply of drinking water. The organization recognized that access to water is only one facet of the problem – a symptom of the position of various sections of our community in the social hierarchy, their disempowerment and marginalization from decision making processes.

Utthan recognizes that empowerment of women is manifested, for example, in the ease of access of water and this has become one focus in their work. After all, it is women who have to walk miles to get water. It is women in villages at the tail ends of the pipes who fight to get water from taps that provide water for 10 to 15 minutes once a week. Nafisaben – as she is affectionately called – highlighted this by pointing out that while men in these villages felt unemployment was the biggest problem, women said that access to water was their most significant concern.

Drought-like conditions have become serious over the last couple of decades. While only about 5% of the population participated in seasonal migration, today about 50% of the population is engaged as migrant laborers. The length of the migratory season has also increased. Water, during these seasons, is unavailable. When it is available, it is often contaminated by carcasses, or is not potable. And yet, fights breakout over the access to such water.

Utthan has worked on empowering women in these communities and in the process facilitating their access to water, using the 73rd amendment of the constitution of India that has led to the devolution of power to local and village level elected bodies and in ensuring that women make up at least 33% of local elected bodies.

At the time, providing drinking water to far flung settlements through pipe lines was accepted as the only public distribution system all over the country. However, the women pressured the Gujarat Water Supply and Sewerage Board (GWSSB) to promote decentralized rain water harvesting structures such has plastic lined ponds, roof water collection tanks etc. Since its beginnings in Bhal, Utthan has expanded to now operate in other drought-prone areas in Gujarat. It continues to organize low income people, particularly women, around the issue of safe and regular access to water, recognizing that water is such an essential commodity to the well-being of the women. It is now recognized as a leading organization nationally on community-managed water resource development within a gender sensitive framework.

Such strategies are consistent with Utthaan’s position that these solutions must be environmentally, socially, economically and politically sustainable. Unless the solution is owned and maintained by the community and unless the community finds the solution relevant, it cannot be sustainable. For one, pipeline based solutions have been planned, devised and implemented by engineers in Ahmedabad who do not understand the realities on the ground. While the pipelines were designed to provide water to a certain number of villages, a certain population, political pressures led to the pipeline network being extended to a number of other villages along the way without commensurate increase water. In addition, owing to faulty connections as well as owing to pilfering of water from the pipes (often through breakage), communities at the tail ends of the network hardly get any water. While these pipes were designed largely to provide water for drinking, pilfered water is being used for cattle, and agriculture.

There is conflict between agricultural and domestic uses of water – the pipeline is not sustainable since it does not provide a solution to this conflict. Unless the solutions are owned by the community, they cannot be sustainable. Increased water usage has depleted water tables. Falling water levels have also led to saline water seeping into the water tables. And yet, these regions that have drought like conditions during part of the year also have significant water logging during the rains. Surely, a sustainable solution is possible.

This solution, Nafisaben points out, is through extensive rain water harvesting. Rainwater harvesting through rooftop tanks is now commonplace in these areas and help provide water for up to 8 months into the dry season. Other small structures like check dams of various kinds, using local resources and materials, have helped. Rainwater harvesting has helped to recharge the ground water leading to significant increase in access to water. In addition, it has helped mitigate salinity of the ground water in these coastal areas. Judicious agricultural practices (eschewing water intensive crops) have also helped. These processes have helped increase the quality and quantity of water.

In empowering women to achieve these results, Utthaan has achieved much. Gujarat has seen a significant drop in gender ratios (reaching to about 850 females to 1000 males). Through these processes, women have taken the lead in making decisions regarding solutions for accessibility to water. In the process of providing leadership to their communities, and planning for the future of their communities, they have forced the state to listen to their concerns and provide resources for rainwater harvesting solutions, challenged traditional patriarchal, feudal and caste based institutions.

While Utthaan does not claim the making of Utopia, it has (along with its efforts in collaborating through a network of other organizations) helped to set truly democratic processes that at least attempt to empower some of the weakest sections of this community and through such empowerment provide solutions for one of the most basic needs – sustainable access to potable water.