WWN INDIA, CONCEPT PAPER, WWF3, KYOTO, JAPAN

Women and Water in India Issues and Directions
(Jasveen Jairath* and Seema Kulkarni#)

The present note attempts to identify some of the fundamental issues in the water sector in India that impinge on poor women’s livelihoods and sustenance – which can only be addressed on the basis of a commitment to equity and sustainable productivity. These need to be addressed from a strategic perspective for initiating a suitable policy process and evolving an action plan that is rooted in the concrete water struggles of women and that takes women’s water voice as the starting point of departure. Following are pointers for a possible view through poor women’s lens on water - 

- ‘Rights’ approach
It is important to acknowledge at the outset that water is a community/common property resource over which all have a primary right of use as part of their fundamental right to life. It is not as a ‘need of’ but as a ‘right to’ that water requires to be recognized. Needs can be provided by another agency (or they may not be) but rights have to be ensured and invite legal sanction if violated. Unsatisfied ‘needs’ - on the other hand - may be allowed to exist ad infinitum. Poor women’s right to water for livelihood therefore has to be enshrined legally and its practice ensured through suitable struggles and negotiations. This recognition has to constitute the premise of planning of water resource development (WRD) that is to bear on the goals/ objectives of all water developments if it is to safeguard the right to water of the poor women and other excluded sections of the population. Women and Water Networks (WWN) in the country can play a crucial role in pushing for such unconventional thinking on water at various national, regional, state and local fora, at the project or community level or any other platform that deliberates and decides on water issues.

- Water as Common Property Resource
Closely linked to the rights approach is the issue of considering water as a common property resource that should not be available for private appropriation. The latter implies monopoly of water resources and exclusion of a section of the users. Typically these are the resource poor people and women from otherwise resource comfortable families – e.g. women from landed families who do not have de facto /de jure control over land/other family assets. Typically there exist following four forms of ownership /control over water – by the community collective with regulated use, by private agents, by state institutions and unregulated communal form of existence. Women and other excluded categories have the least probability of a presence in the private domain; in so far as the poor are under represented in the state institutions or there is weak development of the grass root democratic processes – the poor are also excluded from the state domain; community control is thus the closest to incorporating the water voice of the weakest-of which women constitute the majority. Communities are also interlaid with internal differentiation that are oppressive for women – but the situation is more amenable to for direct action, negotiation, incremental struggles etc. that can call forth gender sensitive WRD in the vicinity. WWNs have a role to play in raising their voice against divorcing of community control from their water resources as it weakens poor women’s control over water and renders their situation more vulnerable due to water induced livelihood insecurity.

- Privatization of Water sources
Following from the above - there is a clear need for the WWN to deliberate and take considered stands on proposed privatization of water sources and associated delivery, maintenance etc. services, that is currently on the agenda of many state governments in the country. There have been cases of whole section of rivers being ‘sold’ to private entrepreneurs as in the case of Sheonath River in Chattisgarh. This river supported the communities in surrounding areas who have now been debarred from accessing the water for their daily needs. Most adversely affected are the poor women – whose only source of water near by has been dislocated - forcing them to go elsewhere. Privatization of drinking water whether through municipal corporations and/or vending through bottled water supply – has lead to exclusion of the most vulnerable section of population from their fundamental right to water by making access to water dependent on their ability to pay and not as their rightful entitlement as citizens of the country. Involvement of small scale private entrepreneurs in the whole water chain can be explored – under regulation of the community for services/skills that are not available in-house. However, allowing large private business corporations to control the water sources for their profit motive – which very often conflicts with the welfare needs of the community and is given precedence over developmental concerns - can be detrimental for women. WWN could usefully engage in raising awareness, discussion, publicizing experiences with privatization elsewhere in India or globally so as to mobilize critical public opinion on the issue. There is need to be alert / vigilant in this regard.

- Right to be heard, informed and recognition of women’s knowledge
Poor women’s traditional wisdom and experiential knowledge acquired over time is seldom recognized as ‘official’ knowledge by the decision making agencies while planning for WRD – thus depriving the planning process of a valuable insight that has high opportunity cost. Incorporating local people’s insights with modern inputs – especially those of women as water users – can steer the policies and decisions towards a more gender sensitive direction. Along with this – the right to be ‘informed’ about the water developments, and awareness among poor women about these rights and their implications as well as the right to be ‘heard’ through effective political representation need to be realized for incorporation of women’s voice for WRD. Right to information about water resources, their development, their (women's) entitlements, policies/plans and right to be heard – to give their feedback on their priorities, concerns, suggestions for problem solving - that is their right not to be treated as passive receivers of information but to actively contribute to its generation - recognition of women's knowledge on judicious use of water and water conservation – its documentation and recognition as 'official' knowledge – these are issues that both the women and the policy makers/implementers need to be sensitized to. Creating spaces and institutions for assertion of women’s voice is critical for getting women’s water priorities effectively instituted. As an advocacy network, WWN seeks to work to promote the realization of these rights for women through mobilization and lobbying.

- Equity and basic service
Minimum water assurance is to be viewed as a right that vests in people by virtue of their right to an adequate livelihood, and not by virtue of the land or other assets that they own. In the conventional approach, water rights are tied to and gained through land rights. Here however we propose that water rights should be separated from land rights. This is also consistent with considering water as a common property resource. As an assured minimum water right, women, landless and other deprived groups should have access to water for livelihoods. What this minimum water assurance is would differ in different regions and locations. However these norms would have to be developed as part of the larger water resource development programme through both assessment of needs and available resources. WWN will initiate and involve in such exercises. 

- Drinking/domestic water requirement
Gender biases are prominently visible in access to drinking water by women. Women's access to drinking water sources, the convenience of access (distance, location of hand pump etc), control over technologies of service provision and maintenance of service etc. remains very poor. Water quality problems - as generated by externalities of industrialization (pollution) and excessive mining of Ground Water for water intensive agriculture or unregulated urbanization (e.g. problems of fluoride /arsenic contamination) with hazardous health implications for poorest (and those without male support) women further aggravate the problem differentially for them (since there is asymmetrical intra-household resource sharing). Lack of access to safe drinking water - its health and labor implications have a gender bias. Strategies of state relief are inadequate in design/content and have insufficient coverage of those affected. In the context of the rights approach, WWN can mobilize poor women as a pressure group for demanding their entitlement of safe and secure drinking water.

- Integration of water sources vs. sectoral/isolated approach
Water from all sources-ground, rain and surface water needs to be pooled. This pool of water from various sources should be the basis for water sector development and management. Such a view of pooling of water resources, combining local and the exogenous water and ground and surface water would facilitate the process of expanding irrigation and domestic use network to a larger number of persons hitherto deprived of water. The approach of first tapping the local water and then supplementing with the exogenous reduces the possibilities of undue submergence and the resultant displacement of the poor and deprived. It also opens up the possibilities of them gaining from the water share as the command are does nor remain restricted to the project but rather includes the entire watershed. Hitherto the practice of treating water in isolated and segmented form has lead to serious ecological externalities with particularly adverse consequences for women. This conceptualization of physical integration of water has to be further broadened to encompass the entire ecological and social environment. That is – WRD issues have to be situated in the perspective of sustainable development and equity. WWN will promote and facilitate this radical reorientation of the WRD paradigm.

- Technology decisions and water as a male domain
Water has by and large been a male domain and technology oriented with conspicuous absence of women in water professional communities, higher education in water sector
etc. Hence the 'male' identification of water professionalism and implicit exclusion of social science disciplines and within that gender concerns. All planning and major policy decisions are taken by the bureaucrat/technocrat nexus who have been nurtured in a gender biased education and professional practice. This needs to be altered by consciously intervening to produce a new generation of water professionals educated in the IWRM perspective with a distinct bias for encouraging women to join the field through selective support. Secondly, technology decisions/choices for WRD are seldom made in consultation with the eventual user community. Structures are created that are often at odds with the local requirements /needs/priorities. Their reproduction as reliable source of water supply to a given region is often difficult and it becomes a dead loss of
investment in addition to creating ecological problems. If the choices are better informed not only is the technology more appropriate to the local needs as articulated by user community - but it could be cost effective and also have better maintenance and sustainability performance. To increase the active participation of poor women in this context is proposed to be a major thrust of WWN action plan.

- Capacity building for interdisciplinary planning and implementation of WRD
The above also implies that community actors and the agencies that design the macro plans for creating and utilizing water resources require multi-disciplinary inputs. The typical approaches to WRD have been highly technocratic and bureaucratic as noted above. This has meant the exclusion of social and community concerns as articulated by the stakeholders who experience water related adversities in the process of decision-making. This means that those vested with the responsibility of solving the problem are ignorant of the complexities of the malady to be addressed. This creates inefficiency of resource utilization for WRD as illustrated by chronic time and cost overruns of most large scale irrigation projects in the country - that fail to deliver the goods even after all that. Women’s requirements, their priorities and sequencing, are seldom taken into account. As fifty percent of the users this amounts to serious blindness in the sectoral water planning. However, inspite of the talk of IWRM, as of now, there does not exist a critical pool of water sector professionals in the country with the capacity to carry out gender sensitive holistic planning and execution of water projects. WWN would lobby and advocate for integrated approaches to water and greater visibility of women in the corridors of apex institutions of water sector planning. This has direct implications for developing the organizational capacity of higher education institutions in the country for incorporating social developmental and gender concerns very deliberately in their course curriculum of programs on water education. Specific actions could be taken to encourage women to take up water management as a profession and WWN could play a prominent role in bridging the gap.


- Pricing, Efficiency and Productivity of Water Use
This is major issue in WRD - enhancing both depends on user involvement. There are at least 50% women among users. Their exclusion from participating in decision making about creation of water resource potential and pattern of utilization preempts the possibility of matching the requirements of demand and supply that often leads to wasteful use of precious resources. Market induced efforts to increase water use efficiency through pricing are typically ineffective as regulatory mechanisms since decisions of water use depend on the totality of production conditions surrounding the user. The decisions cannot be reduced to market considerations alone. The lower than possible productivity/efficiency levels of water use that are well acknowledged across board therefore represent colossal underutilization of the resources invested in creating huge irrigation infrastructures. A deeper analysis of constraints of production at the grass roots that women face is called for in order facilitate productive/efficient water use through a consistent policy package for market and non-market interventions that will encourage a water conserving land use pattern. Neglecting women as water users here is thus at a high social cost. WWN could possibly initiate or sponsor research into these issues from a gender perspective and use the outcome as a basis for advocacy.

- Advocacy and Networking
Among and for women for water issues and developing their negotiating capacities is an area that requires urgent attention. WWN can play a crucial role for creating a dedicated/special platform for articulation of gendered water voice, its facilitation from the grass root to the policy making fora, create networks for mutual support during localized struggles and strengthening of the voice. Support could also be provided for information dissemination and coordinating with scattered water related
experiences/struggles/successes/activities. Leading on from this – efforts could be made for developing the negotiating confidence and capacity of women for realizing their water rights at the local level and beyond. Need for this is paramount given the widely documented adversities caused differentially to women specially in cases of displacement caused by large irrigation projects where again women bear the greater brunt of dislocation as also during drought induced migration where women do double day of labor in alien place and undergo sexual harassment by the labor contractors. Organizing, networking and voicing their concerns loud and clear through capacity building initiatives has greater externalities as the empowerment through negotiating for water rights spills over to other sphere as well. Control over water decisions is a basis of women’s empowerment as it connotes a political control over their lives.