In March this year, while carrying three pots of water in the scorching sun one afternoon, 24-year-old Manta Rinjad fainted on the deserted pathway from the well to her house. “Nobody even saw me on the street lying like a dead person,” she says. “When I woke up after 20 minutes [I saw that] I’d spilled all the water. Somehow, I walked back home and woke up my husband who made namak-sakhar [salt-sugar] water for me.” This year, Mamta, like the other women of Galtare, has had to begin her gruelling daily summer treks to a dug well, located three kilometres away, much earlier than in the past. The two dug wells in Galtare village of Vada taluka (also spelt as Wada) in Palghar district of Maharashtra, completely dried up in February. In previous years, the people here say, the water in the village’s dug wells – which they use for drinking and cooking – has lasted till the beginning of May. After that, the women have to walk to the distant well which usually has some water left. But in 2019, the scarcity began months earlier. "We have suffered water problems every summer, but this year all our sources of water are going dry," says 42-year-old Manali Padwale, who, like Mamta, works at a large temple complex near the village as a cleaner for Rs. 155 a day, where her husband works as a driver. “We have not once been supplied with water tankers and we don't have enough money to buy them,” she adds. The Vaitarna river, which passes at a distance of around half a kilometres from the village, is one of the major sources of water for Galtare’s 2,474 residents (Census 2011), most of them from the Koli Malhar and Warli (listed as Varli in the Census) Adivasi communities. By May this year, the river had only a pile of rocks and barely any water. In previous summers, the people of Galtare say, the Vaitarna has had more water. “The little water [now] left in the river is used to wash cattle and then the same dirty water flows into the village taps," adds Manali.

PHOTO • Shraddha Agarwal PHOTO • Shraddha Agarwal

“Due to excess deforestation in the region the rivers are drying up,” says Stalin Dayanand, an environmentalist based in Mumbai. “They have turned into a seasonal river from a perennial river. This happens when the relationship between the forests and rivers are broken.”

PHOTO • Shraddha Agarwal PHOTO • Shraddha Agarwal

There is only a trickle of water from the two old borewells in the village, and the hand pumps break down frequently. In 2018 and during panchayat elections in 2015, the people of Galtare recall, the panchayat surveyed the village land and dug five more borewells, but did not install hand pumps. "I even got the stamp papers ready, stating my land can be used for for the hand pump. The panchayat still hasn't started the construction," says Pratiksha. “We get funding of only Rs. 10 lakhs per year. It costs 80,000 rupees to dig one borewell. We have to use the funds for other necessities too,” says 32-year-old Yogesh Vartha; his wife and Galtare’s sarpanch, 29-year-old Netra, stands silently while he responds to my queries. When the water sources dry up, the women and girls of the village usually bear the increased burden of fetching and storing it for their families. “Bring us tankers from the city, we are exhausted,” shouts Nandini Padwale, while trying to scrape water from the bottom of that dug well three kilometres away. It’s now her family’s only source of drinking water. She is standing on top of the 100-feet deep well’s three-feet surrounding wall and pulling out a plastic bucket with a rope. One misstep and she could fall right in.



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It takes Nandini around 50-60 minutes to go to the well and return home, and she makes at least four trips in her day – twice starting at 6 a.m., once around noon, and then again in the evening at 6 p.m., before it gets dark. "I can’t stop mid-way to rest,” she says. “It's already hard to balance the pots. It will take all day if I keep putting them up and down from my head."



PHOTO • Shraddha Agarwal PHOTO • Shraddha Agarwal PHOTO • Shraddha Agarwal