Blue saree brigade: Women at the heart of India’s water systems | India News
In the parched flatlands of Bundelkhand, one of India’s most water-stressed regions, a woman wakes before sunrise. She does not head to a well. She heads to a meeting. As a Jal Saheli — a “Friend of Water” — she is part of a network of roughly 1,530 women across 321 villages who have spent the last decade digging check dams, reviving ancient ponds, repairing handpumps, and holding councils on groundwater. They are mostly illiterate. They are entirely indispensable.On this World Water Day, the United Nations has made its message unambiguous: the global water crisis is, at its core, a gender crisis — and the solution runs through women. The 2026 campaign, themed “Water and Gender: Where Water Flows, Equality Grows,” calls for a transformative, rights-based approach where women have equal voice, leadership, and opportunity in water decision-making. Across India, quietly and without ceremony, that transformation is already underway.
The Jal Saheli Movement
When the rains failed for the thirteenth time in Bundelkhand, Shirkunwar Rajput – woman who led the Paani Panchayat in Udguwan (Lalitpur)- did not wait for the government. She gathered the women of her village and said something that would eventually be carved in stone on a check dam: “In Bundelkhand, fetching water is entirely a woman or girl’s job. Hence, women have the first right on water resources,” as quoted by Mongabay.The Jal Saheli movement, founded in 2005 from Madhogarh in Jalaun, Uttar Pradesh, grew from that conviction. By 2024, around 1,530 Jal Sahelis were active across 321 villages in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. These women — aged between 18 and 70, clad in simple blue sarees have built over one hundred check dams, revived traditional ponds, installed new handpumps and created soak pits that reduce run-off waste.The impact has been agricultural as well as domestic. Before the Jal Sahelis intervened, farmers in some of these villages could grow only a single crop of wheat per year. Assured irrigation has since enabled two to three annual harvests. Groundwater recharge from the check dams has brought functioning wells back to communities where children used to share a single pump among 1,200 people.Welthungerhilfe, working alongside the NGO Parmarth Samaj Sevi Sansthan, trained these women volunteers in water resource planning, water table monitoring, and conservation techniques before sending them back to their villages as experts. The model has since drawn the attention of government departments in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, both of which have expressed interest in scaling it to 5,000 villages.
Governing the underground: Atal Bhujal Yojana
India’s aquifers are in crisis. The Central Ground Water Board classified 256 districts as water-stressed as recently as 2020, and the country’s average per-capita water availability is projected to decline sharply by 2050. Against this backdrop, the Government of India launched the Atal Bhujal Yojana (Atal Jal) in 2020 — a Rs. 6,000 crore ($756 million) scheme co-funded by the World Bank, targeting 8,562 gram panchayats across seven water-stressed states: Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh.What makes Atal Jal distinctive is not just its budget but its politics. The scheme mandates that at least 33 percent of members of Village Water and Sanitation Committees (VWSCs) must be women. In practice, the representation has gone further: women now hold an average of 44 percent of seats across the scheme’s gram panchayats. Crucially, 33 percent of women are occupying actual decision-making positions — President, Vice President, Secretary, and Treasurer — within Water User Associations.By the scheme’s own figures, the results are material: an area of 670,802 hectares has been covered under demand-side water efficiency activities, saving an estimated 1,716 million cubic metres of water through micro-irrigation, crop diversification, and rainwater harvesting. A further 642 million cubic metres of groundwater has been recharged through the construction of 77,052 structures. Around 30 million people have benefited, at a per-beneficiary cost of roughly Rs. 2,627.In Haryana, the scheme has taken on a distinctly feminine face through the figure of the Jal Saheli — a local resource person, usually a woman from a self-help group, trained to conduct water quality tests, communicate groundwater data to communities, and advocate for efficient irrigation practices. In Rajasthan’s Phalodi district, Jal Sahelis working under UNICEF and the NGO Unnati revived a centuries-old village pond, raising Rs. 1.5 million in community funds alongside MGNREGA allocations.
Bhubaneswar ‘caller club’
The water revolution in India is not only happening in fields and check dams. It is also happening through smartphones in urban slums.Between January 2023 and December 2024, the Centre for Advocacy and Research (CFAR), supported by the Australian Government’s Water for Women Fund, ran a landmark urban WASH initiative across 215 informal settlements in Bhubaneswar, Odisha. At its heart was a “Caller Club”: trained community members who called on behalf of residents to log and escalate water, sanitation, and hygiene grievances through the Janhit-Vaani Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS).Community members made a total of 18,750 calls over the two-year period. Women led the effort, accounting for 10,419 calls — and providing the majority of feedback, with 5,610 calls on water-related issues specifically. Of the 8,517 water-related grievances recorded, 4,550 (53.4 percent) were formally addressed, benefiting 8,696 people. Sanitation grievances fared even better: 4,783 of 6,767 reported issues (70.7 percent) were resolved, and hygiene-related complaints saw a 98.4 percent resolution rate.The urban local body, the Public Health Engineering Department, and Watco responded positively to online grievances, working with communities to both resolve issues and educate residents on infrastructure maintenance. The project also funded climate-resilient infrastructure upgrades across 126 settlements: elevated toilets to prevent monsoon flooding, stormwater drains, and solar-powered water filtration plants — all designed with input from the women who use them.Laxmipriya Lenka, President of the Slum Development Association in Bhubaneswar, was among the voices that made this feedback loop work. Her leadership exemplifies what the UN Women’s 2026 World Water Day campaign calls for: not just access to water, but agency over it.
Evidence for women’s leadership
The case for women’s centrality in water governance is not merely moral — it is empirical. A landmark study on India’s panchayats, cited by UN Women, found that the number of drinking water projects in areas with women-led local councils was 62 percent higher than in those led by men. Research across 44 water projects in Asia and Africa, cited by the World Resources Institute, found that when women helped shape water policies and institutions, communities used water more sustainably and equitably.Yet the structural barriers remain significant. Fewer than 50 countries globally have laws or policies that specifically mention women’s participation in water resources management. In India, the national water policies of 1987, 2002, and 2012 consistently sidelined women — policies drafted, largely, by men who did not traditionally carry water home. It is only with schemes like Jal Jeevan Mission and Atal Bhujal Yojana, and the grassroots pressure of movements like the Jal Sahelis, that this omission is beginning to be corrected.
The economic case is equally compelling. In India alone, productivity losses attributable to women’s water-collection duties are estimated to be equivalent to approximately Rs. 10 billion — or roughly $160 billion, nearly 4.7 percent of GDP. Every tap closer to home, every check dam that holds monsoon water through March, translates into hours returned to women: for school, for work, for rest, for leadership.Chandrakant Kumbhani, chief operating officer, Community Development, Ambuja Foundation, underscores this transformation: “Water resource development is one of the most powerful drivers of women’s empowerment in rural India. But the real shift happens when women move beyond being beneficiaries to becoming decision-makers — involved in planning, managing, and governing water systems at the village level. This participation builds confidence, visibility, and leadership, enabling them to influence not just water-related decisions, but broader community priorities. As climate pressures intensify, this role becomes even more critical. Women’s involvement strengthens how communities plan for and manage water resources, making systems more adaptive and sustainable.”
A movement in stone
The check dams of Bundelkhand carry inscriptions. In the local dialect, chiselled into concrete, they read: “Women have the first right on water resources.” This is not poetry. A declaration that the women who suffer most from scarcity are the ones who have earned the authority to manage abundance.Leela Khatun, Leader of the Jal Sahelis, described the work of reviving a village pond. “The pond is a lifeline for the villagers, particularly during the summer, drought, and periods of scanty rainfall. We undertook the task of cleaning the pond, using both manual labour and excavators,” she told UNICEF proudly. “Some of the desilting work was carried out under MGNREGA. We held discussions with the village head and the villagers to ensure a sustainable water supply.“Across India — from the slum settlements of Bhubaneswar to the gram panchayats of Rajasthan, from the overexploited aquifers of Haryana to the drought-scarred plateaus of Madhya Pradesh — women like Devwati Sharma are doing the technical, political, and physical labour of water governance. They are holding meetings, filing grievances, repairing infrastructure, and teaching water literacy to communities that the formal sector has yet to reach.On this World Water Day, the United Nations has a slogan: “Where Water Flows, Equality Grows.” In India, the women who have spent years with their hands in the earth already know it to be true. The question now is whether the world’s governments, donors, and institutions will carve it into their own policies — with the same permanence that a Jal Saheli chisels it into stone.
