Even as India reels under devastating floods sweeping across state after state, another grim reality looms large — a crippling water crisis. A recent NITI Aayog report warns that nearly 600 million Indians face high to extreme water stress, with around 200,000 people dying each year due to lack of safe water. The paradox is most stark in cities like Delhi, Bengaluru, and Chennai, where taps run dry and shortages are worsening despite the deluge elsewhere. In Delhi alone, a Greenpeace India survey across 12 localities found that low-income households spend nearly 15 per cent of their monthly income just to secure drinking water, often waiting for Delhi Jal Board tankers carrying 3,000 litres — a stopgap solution the government hopes to replace with water ATMs.
It is a reminder of those exhibitions of traditional Indian art, where she always appears — the ever-graceful village woman, poised in her sari, balancing earthen pots of water on her head or drawing a bucket from a well with effortless rhythm. As millions of Indian homes battle every day for a few litres of safe drinking water, the image that once represented unending tenacity and abundance now seems almost incongruous. She is elegance, resilience, and sacrifice wrapped in a saree. What a poetic way to immortalise chronic water scarcity and centuries of gendered labour — as if fetching water were not a survival struggle, but a cultural performance worth celebrating in brushstrokes. In rural India, collecting water is almost universally seen as a woman’s duty, deeply rooted in social norms, an untiring but unseen obligation ingrained in day-to-day existence. It is usual for women and girls to go five to 20 kilometres a day, and perhaps more, to collect water from hand pumps, communal taps, or far-off wells, many of which are hidden away from their settlements. The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) reveals that in around 71 per cent of rural households, women aged 15 and above are solely responsible for water collection. These treks, covering an average of 173 kilometres annually, amount to some 210 hours—or nearly 27 full days—lost each year to water collection alone.
In addition to being physically taxing, this burden has a negative impact on dignity, education, and health. Heavy water container carrying results in physical pain and chronic weariness, and the lengthy trips put women at risk for harassment, particularly in remote or dangerous places. In the meantime, women and girls frequently miss out on income-generating opportunities and school because they must walk for water, which puts many in a vicious circle of disempowerment.
These challenges are rooted in the patriarchal norm that the ‘ideal traditional woman’ must manage the household, even if the water supply runs out. This idea, under the guise of tradition, upholds injustice across time and national borders. Under this context, polygamy has emerged in a drought-prone Maharashtra hamlet as a result of men in rural India fully entrusting women with water management. Having multiple spouses to collect water is part of this. ‘Water wives’ are the words used to describe the arrangement. A desperate adaptation to water scarcity has emerged: men marrying additional wives—often widows or unmarried women without dowry—for the sole purpose of ensuring their families have access to water. These ‘water wives’ regain a semblance of social standing through marriage yet are relegated to fetching water as their only duty. Though they are provided with shelter and a degree of respect, they are denied basic rights such as inheritance or conjugal life. In households with multiple wives, household chores are distributed so someone is always available to gather water. While this arrangement may appear pragmatic, it is a deeply regressive adaptation—one that reinforces gender inequality and undermines the rights and identities of these women.
In contrast to the water scarcity problem, the numerous floods that have occurred in several Indian states also highlight the predicament of women in this additional water-related disaster. According to Food and Agriculture Organization data, female-headed rural households lose three per cent more income to floods than their male-headed counterparts—equating to approximately $35 per person annually, cumulatively amounting to billions in losses. In India, women’s dominant role in agriculture combined with caregiving responsibilities limits their ability to escape flood-related threats and heightens their physical vulnerability. In Assam’s Dhemaji, recurrent floods continue to displace families. Men often migrate for work, leaving women to shoulder household survival amidst environmental and emotional turmoil. Despite ongoing disasters in the Himalayas, gender-poor policy responses often leave women side-lined in early-warning systems, relief planning, and rehabilitation. Urban flooding in Chennai exposes how women face severe privacy and safety risks when sanitation and infrastructure fail—especially during such sudden events. Whether in rural Assam or urban Chennai, they face compounded risks—economic, emotional, safety, and health—amid infrastructure and policy failures.
Flooding, abrupt cloudbursts, falling water levels, and global warming may all appear to be natural occurrences, but their effects are far from equal. In patriarchal societies, women bear the societal and economic costs of climate change, in addition to the direct physical burden.
These environmental disturbances damage livelihood structures, especially in rural areas where women depend disproportionately on natural resources but frequently do not have access to legal or financial resources. Social vulnerabilities also increase as a result of patriarchy-driven limitations that restrict women’s mobility, keep them out of decision-making processes, and reduce their access to safety nets. As a result, particularly in post-disaster environments, women are more vulnerable to assault, exploitation, interrupted schooling, and child marriage.
Conflict theory holds that continuous conflicts between powerful and weaker groups over scarce resources shape civilisation. Institutional norms and laws are examples of systems that dominant groups utilise to maintain their advantage, while marginalised groups have structural disadvantages. In the political, cultural, and economic spheres, women are systematically vulnerable as a persistently marginalised and subordinate group. Women are not a monolithic population. Members of racial, ethnic, or economic marginalisation also face a variety of intersecting kinds of oppression that make them more vulnerable in ways that single-axis studies fail to account for. Conflict is not merely a theoretical concept; it is the painful reality in which women—particularly those who are doubly or threefold marginalised—suffer the most. To bring about change, we must track down and eliminate all forms of oppression, including those based on gender, class, and race.
Trishna Sarkar is Assistant Professor (Department of Economics) at Dr BR Ambedkar College, University of Delhi
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth