We have serious issues with water at Hunar Ghar. The village itself is very dry – for two years there has been inadequate rainfall, and people are really starting to feel the pinch. We are being pretty vigilant at the moment about child attendance: It is up because food is short, they don’t have enough to eat and there are still several months until the next rain, and we feed the children. If a child stops coming, however, they may be ill. We are starting to enter the time of year when that illness can lead to death. It’s that serious right now.

At Hunar Ghar we don’t have an independent water source. Sakuribai carries water on her head each day from a well a few hundred yards away. She had to carry something like 12 pots, which is a lot of work. It is also time consuming, and it is the same situation when we need water for building works. We’ve basically given up growing plants outside of the rainy season such are the water difficulties.

On Monday however some super people at FES, the Foundation for Ecological Security, came and did a water survey of the area around the school and I believe the have found a good place for us to start digging. They are going to give us a full report, so I’ll be able to confirm it then, but hopefully we’ll have water guaranteed at Hunar Ghar soon.

We’d also like to do a full village, or group of villages, survey. It would be expensive, and we wouldn’t be able to do much with it at the moment. But it would mean that in time to come we, the villagers, other NGOs or the government would have access to high quality information as to where to dig or drill for water.

Water security is a massive, and increasing, concern of rural populations like ours. Diffing another well is a short term measure, we need to know why the water table has dropped so much and address those issues, such as deforestation, monoculture, burning of waste organic matter, altered rain patterns, if we are going to find real solutions.