As India moves towards the centenary of the Mahad Satyagraha in March 2027, Ambedkar Jayanti 2026 should force a national reckoning: who gets safe water, who handles waste, and why caste still shapes both.
This Ambedkar Jayanti should not be reduced to garlands, slogans and ritual remembrance. It should mark the beginning of a year-long national reflection leading up to 20 March 2027, when the Mahad Satyagraha reaches its centenary. That anniversary should not remain a commemorative date in Dalit memory alone. It should become a moment for the country to revisit one of the deepest questions Babasaheb Ambedkar ever posed to Indian society: who has the right to water, and who still has to negotiate for dignity?
We often remember India’s freedom struggle through the Salt Satyagraha. We should also remember that, before salt, there was water. In March 1927, Ambedkar led thousands to the Chavdar tank at Mahad and drank water from a public source from which the so-called untouchables had long been excluded. That act was simple only on the surface. In reality, it was revolutionary. It declared that access to the essentials of life could no longer be governed by caste. Mahad Satyagraha was not a plea for kindness; it was a claim to equal personhood. Its constitutional echo is unmistakable. Article 15(2)(b) prohibits caste-based exclusion from wells, tanks, bathing ghats, roads and places of public resort, and Article 17 abolishes untouchability itself.
This is also why Mahad remains so politically and morally unsettling. The Salt Satyagraha challenged colonial rule. Mahad challenged the caste Hindu society. Dandi confronted an external empire; Mahad confronted the internal order of graded inequality. One demanded freedom from foreign domination. The other demanded freedom from fellow Indians. That is a harder demand, because it asks society to look inward and recognise its own cruelty. Ambedkar understood this not only as theory but as lived experience. His childhood memory of “no peon, no water” captured caste in its most ordinary and brutal form: control over touch, access, waiting, dependence and humiliation.
A century later, that question has not disappeared. It has changed form. For many Dalits, Adivasis and other marginalised communities, the struggle is no longer only about formal entry to a public tank. It is also about the quality, regularity, safety and control of water. The question is no longer just whether one may drink, but what kind of water one is expected to drink, from where, at what distance, and with what indignity. That is why Mahad must be read not only as history, but as environmental justice. Water is not simply a natural resource. It is a basic public good, a condition of health, labour, education and life itself. To deny safe water, or to distribute it unequally, is to shape life chances. The language of Sustainable Development Goal 6 is explicit on this point: the task is not merely access, but universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water and sanitation.
India has, to be sure, made substantial gains in rural drinking water infrastructure. Government of India data show that rural tap-water coverage under the Jal Jeevan Mission rose from 16.7 per cent of households at the start of the programme to 81.71 per cent as of 3 March 2026, reaching about 15.82 crore rural households. That is significant progress and should be acknowledged. But a connection is not the same thing as equality. A 2023 study by Vinod Kumar Mishra of the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies, based on NSSO 76th Round data, shows that Scheduled Caste households remain significantly less likely than high-caste households to have an exclusive household water source, with over half of the gap linked to caste-based discrimination. In other words, the story is not simply one of poverty or scarcity. It is also one of exclusion within infrastructure itself. Mahad has not vanished. It has moved from the public tank to the household tap, the standpost, the pipeline and the segregated settlement.
That is why the politics of water in India cannot be treated as socially neutral. Who gets pipes, whose handpump is repaired, which colony receives regular supply, whose locality is bypassed, whose water is contaminated and whose complaints are ignored—these are not merely technical failures. They are questions of power. And they become sharper under climate change. Down To Earth itself has repeatedly documented how water stress, unequal infrastructure and environmental vulnerability reinforce one another. UN-Water has likewise stressed that water and climate are inseparably linked: climate impacts are making supply more irregular, scarce and polluted. In unequal villages, peri-urban settlements and urban margins, scarcity does not fall equally. The powerful secure storage, filtration, private tankers and political access. The marginalised queue longer, travel farther, absorb poorer quality water, or simply go without. Climate stress does not replace caste. It magnifies caste.
Water, moreover, cannot be separated from sanitation. This is where the moral force of Mahad meets the brutal persistence of caste labour. The same social order that historically denied Dalits access to clean public water has long relegated caste-marked communities to the most degrading and dangerous work around drains, sewers and septic tanks. Government data from March 2026 states that 89,114 sewer and septic tank workers had been validated under the NAMASTE scheme as of 31 December 2025. Another official reply stated that 58,098 manual scavengers had been identified in the 2013 and 2018 surveys. A further government reply stated that 471 sanitation workers had died due to hazardous sewer and septic tank cleaning since 2019, up to 31 October 2025; another March 2026 reply reported 317 deaths during 2021-2025. These figures come from different official reference periods, but they point in the same direction: caste-linked sanitation labour remains a deadly reality, and the promise of dignity remains violently incomplete.
This is precisely why Ambedkar Jayanti 2026 should consciously mark the beginning of a Mahad centenary year centred on water and caste. Governments should use the occasion not for token speeches but for a serious programme of action: a caste audit of drinking water and sanitation access; public monitoring of water quality and supply continuity in SC and ST habitations; stronger accountability against discrimination at common water sources; and a time-bound commitment to end hazardous sanitation labour through mechanisation, protection and rehabilitation. Universities, local governments, Ambedkarite organisations and climate-justice groups should reclaim Mahad not as a museum event but as a living constitutional question. The right tribute to Ambedkar is not only to praise him, but to complete the democratic work he began.
Babasaheb did not go to Mahad merely to drink water. He went there to announce that democracy begins where humiliation ends. A hundred years later, India must ask itself whether water has truly become a right in the full sense of the term, or whether caste still decides who drinks safely, who waits, who cleans and who dies.
Until water flows without caste, Mahad is not memory. It is a warning.
Dr Madhusudan Nag is a Senior Researcher at NIT Bhopal whose work focuses on labour, caste and urban inequality.
Shakuntala Ghadai is a PhD scholar at the Centre for Development Studies, Kerala, working on gender, food security and caste.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth