Her parched truth

Dr Arteeshymal Joshi at a well in Dharmewadi, Beed district, where people depend on bore connections and small wells for a better part of the year

For Samina, 55, resident of Panwadi village in the Phulambri taluka of Aurangabad district, four days of the menstrual cycle appear "like four dreadful years". After Diwali, Samina's village ceases to get even the irregular water supply on public taps. Women queue up at neighbourhood wells or fight endlessly for a few litres of water from tankers arriving at erratic hours. Every morning begins with a search for water required for a household filled with children. COVID or no COVID, hell descends on earth once a month, when she has little water and less time to wash her inners. She cannot afford sanitary pads, which basically means she carries on (unwashed) with her chores on heavy bleeding days.

Samina is not the only one who shares the unspoken "period" truth. Hers is among the 400-odd voices documented in a new research-based book on the drought-affected women of Marathwada, a region like Vidarbha, associated with farmers' suicides in the public consciousness.

Women from Panwadi village in the Phulambri taluka of Aurangabad district have to travel long distances to draw water from wells. The village made it to prime time TV news in June 2019, when seven women fell into a well and injured themselves severely

Dushkalat Tichi Horpal (Her Plight in the Drought, Aastha Publications) by the Aurangabad-based scholar-feminist writer Dr Arteeshymal Joshi, 42, showcases the region - essentially eight neglected districts of Maharashtra - that accounts for around 17 per cent of Maharashtra's population, not to forget, 30 per cent of the state's below poverty line households. In normal conditions, which are rare, Marathwada receives 650 mm daily rainfall in the four monsoon months. In 2016, the year of the drought, the region recorded 450 mm rain, which caused severe depletion of groundwater levels and little storage in the dams.

While the vagaries of nature impact men and women equally, author Joshi sensitises the reader to the invisible and under-recorded burden carried by women of all ages in the drought-ridden geographies. Her earlier research initiatives are also defined by a similar lens, like her study of women ragpickers, or the impact of the lockdown on women's mobility. She treats women's status as a decisive factor in assessing the impact of a drought or any other crises, be it an earthquake, floods, riots or a pandemic. A gender-salient approach is an inconvenient one, as it adds another layer of complexity, and also adds to the nature of the relief work. Dr Joshi asks: Which policy document or commission of inquiry on Maharashtra's water resource management addresses a menstruating/pregnant/dehydrated woman's predicament? Is there a count of the abortions caused by the heavy water-filled utensils carried by women on their heads? Which White Paper has recorded water paucity as one of the prime reasons for women's aversion for bedtime sex in drought-affected territories? "Neither the ruling government, nor the central bodies nor the Administrator/Collector office ever acknowledge these naked discomforting truths, as if they don't exist," says the enraged researcher.

Water-filled handas mounted on a cycle in Indapur village, Osmanabad district, bear testimony to the water storage responsibilities on the shoulders of women

Dushkalat Tichi Horpal, in fact, focuses on women's discordant sex lives in the context of the drought. Dr Joshi has interviewed women who consider marital sex a punishment in the sweltering heat (42 degree Celsius). She cites the tragic words of newly married Lakshmi (Ghansawangi, Jalna district), which haunt her often: "The day goes by in transporting water, and the husband wants me to surrender to his demands at night. My genital areas experience extreme itchiness/redness due to dehydration. I have to often beg him to stop the intercourse. Added to that problem is the in-laws' refrain for a grandchild." Lakshmi cannot think of running away to her mother, as the latter also suffers due to water shortage.

Unlike Lakshmi, some women in Undri, Beed, and Rui, Jalna, have another problem of nausea during sex. Women usually cannot bathe leisurely in the open; a daily bath is a privilege, due to which their sweaty bodies don't look forward to any physical togetherness in the day. One married couple decided to bathe in the night, just to feel energised, but became a target of ridicule in the family circle, recounts Dr Joshi, adding that many women were hesitant about sharing their marriage woes. Some shared their collective pain with other female sufferers of the village. They felt cathartic in publicising their family names in the context of the unending hardships, especially accidents near wells.

Researcher Dr Joshi seen with women from Panwadi in 2019, another devastating drought year

In Dharmewadi village, Beed, a 79-year-old aaji fell into a well and was handicapped for life; but that well, till date, remains the sole water source. In Dhorgaon, Nanded, an elderly woman, with severely bruised knees has taken on the responsibility of bringing water, as her daughter-in-law wouldn't otherwise be able to cook the meals - the men of the house do not share the water duties. Panwadi, a village comprising 1,200 residents, mostly Muslim, made it to prime time TV news in June 2019, when seven women fell into a well and injured themselves severely.

Dr Joshi shared a select list of women who were further open to talking to this columnist about either instances of domestic abuse or unfair treatment in the context of the water crisis. The experiences of these brave-hearts are shocking, to say the least. In fact, they bring home the million hidden ways in which the lack of water can narrow down livelihood options and compel families to relocate to metros. Households run by single (widowed) women are particularly vulnerable; many of these family units abandoned their labour-intensive traditional occupations (farming) and took to manual labour. Resham, 25, from Osmababad city falls in this most defenseless category. After her husband committed suicide, she started working as a domestic help to feed and school her two daughters. At one point
she was raped by her father-in-law, after which she relocated the girls to her sister's place. As the sole earner (R5,000 monthly), she has forsaken her claim over the agricultural land, which doesn't reap much during droughts.

Dr Joshi has a nuanced understanding of the region she surveys. Having been raised, educated and married in a water-scarce city with fixed water hours, she is particularly sensitive to limited storage. She recalls one phase when she missed her lectures in BAMU (Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University), where she graduated in Fine Arts, and post-graduated in Women's Studies, as she waited for the municipal corporation's water connection. After launching the non-profit Aastha Janvikas Sanstha with her journalist-husband Mahesh Joshi in 2010, her interaction with rural Marathwada intensified in the form of time-bound research projects.

"To have a tap at home! That's a privilege taken for granted in metros. But my visits [around 40 in the last five years] to rural Marathwada opened my eyes and ears to women who walk 3 to 4 km daily to draw water from wells or lakes. They work so hard for this unpaid-unsalaried chore," she shares. Dr Joshi and her husband have walked with the villagers to gain first-hand experience of droughts, which occurred in 2016 and 2019. As she recounts, the road trips to some villages were eye-opening. For instance, there's no paved road to Hatkarwadi in Beed district, and a ghat section renders the water tanker service impossible. The village's hand pumps were also unusable. Result: No girl of marriageable age considers Hatkarwadi as an option. In other words, families lose their social standing because of their residence in a waterless village. Latur-based Sunanda Sathe, 48, says a household with an ancestral well is perceived as a "good catch" in the marriage market.

Water has a direct bearing on the health of women and men. Dr Joshi travelled to villages, which received muddy water. She says the red colour of the water in Injanpur village, Hingoli, left her shocked. "It was the water one wouldn't use for mopping the floor; it redefined my markers of potability." Not just in remote mofussil Marathwada, but some suburbs of Aurangabad too, like Jaibhim Nagar, have been receiving contaminated water for years; citizens are unable to awaken the municipal body to the broken drain pipes.

Dushkalat Tichi Horpal bares the broken backbone of rural India. It demonstrates the hollowness of the slogans raised in praise of a swacch, self-reliant, forward-looking Bharat. We peep into an exhausted, low-energy India, which is perspiring, unclean and devoid of storage avenues. Men and women lock their tanks in the fear of water theft. Some indulge in barter exchanges to guarantee water in their homes. Women in their 30s look for reasons to remove their uterus, just to get rid of periods. Youth call themselves "cursed", like the Class X student Kajal Nirmal from Injangaon. Kajal says she wants "to run away from the village as soon as she gets a degree and a job in a city". She dreads climbing down the steps of a deep well every day. Her elder brother Rahul, however, "regrets" being the man of the house. "Girls can at least marry and relocate, but boys are cursed with subsistence farming."

Be it the lack of public water taps or the government delay in digging bore wells, women are the prime sufferers in Marathwada. It's not surprising therefore, that women are at the forefront of protests and agitations centred around water. The book cites women's handa, ghagar morchas, thiyya andolans, and violent break-the-furniture outbursts in many gram panchayat offices. Women, though exploited at home and often not permitted to join the protest marches, take on a lead role in water-related agitations. As the book sufficiently demonstrates, women want the rulers of today to put water management on top of the governance agenda. Their belief in corrective action is consistently visible. That's the oasis amidst the drought.

Sumedha Raikar-Mhatre is a culture columnist in search of the sub-text. You can reach her at sumedha.raikar @mid-day.com