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DEVELOPMENT-SRI LANKA
Water Woes Fall on Women’s Shoulders
By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Mar 9, 2010 (IPS) - As a wife of a rice farmer and mother of two children aged nine and two,
Sanjeevani Bandara’s days are packed with chores. Yet while she used to be able
to keep up with all she has to do in a day, this Sri Lankan mother now finds
herself struggling to accomplish even the most basic tasks.
Blame it on the weather, which has been causing water shortages that force
Bandara to spend more and more time fetching water for her family, farther
away from home.
While the volume of annual rainfall in Sri Lanka has not changed, agriculture
specialist Champa Navaratna says that weather patterns are changing to
high-intensity rain for short periods, causing floods, landslides and long
periods of drought – which in turn result in water problems.
A water crisis has a grim impact on this South Asian country’s women,
whose long list of household chores includes securing and managing the
family’s water supply. In rural areas, that can include ensuring a steady
source for the family’s crops.
Water expert Kusum Athukorala, chairwoman of the Colombo-based
Network of Women Water Professionals (NetWater), even says that the impact
of scarce water resources on women is at the heart of the water issue. A
shortage, she says, "makes their life harder and more so because they are not
part of the decision-making process".
Bandara, for instance, says that wells in her village in Kurunegala, in Sri
Lanka’s north central region, have been running dry far too often. She has
thus been forced to cycle more than two kilometres for water, carrying it
gingerly back in an earthen pot each time.
"I have to go about six times a day to collect water for the family," she says,
adding that she leaves her two-year-old with her husband or a friend
whenever she has to fetch more water.
Activists say Bandara can still consider herself lucky because at least she
can load her pots of water onto a bicycle. Many other women walk the
distance from home to water source and back. By comparison, says Lanka
Rainwater Harvesting Forum director Thanuja Ariyananda, "men transport it
in trucks or motorcycles".
Just about 35 percent of Sri Lanka’s 20 million people receive pipe-borne
water provided by a state agency. The rest get their supply from wells, rivers
or streams. Water for agriculture, mainly rice farming, is provided through a
system of canals channeled from rivers and streams.
Securing a steady supply of water has thus been a perennial problem for
most Sri Lankan households, but the situation has become more desperate of
late. Many Sri Lankans now sound like Jeevani Fernando, a grassroots
environmentalist from Negombo, about 30 km north of Colombo on the west
coast, who says there is a shortage of water in several areas in her locality.
"Rivers are running dry and pipe-borne water to most homes is reduced to
two to three hours a day," she says. "As a result of this there are many
problems for women owing to the impact on school-going children, their
food and education, and washing of clothes."
Part of the problem, say experts, is that the storage capacity of reservoirs
that provide much of the pipe-borne water is limited and cannot take the full
complement of high-intensity rains. This results in a run-off into the ocean,
which also occurs due to floods.
"There is also a problem of siltation in the reservoir, which then further
reduces its capacity," adds Navaratna.
It has not helped that the country’s planners have been slow to respond to
the crisis. For some time now, they have being discussing enhancing rain-
harvesting schemes, but that is as far as they have gone.
At the same time, Athukorala notes that discussions on water issues by
local authorities or other agencies barely include women and their concerns.
"Everyone takes water for granted, even female parliamentarians," she says.
"Their response to access to water is to provide pipe-borne water without
realising that water resources are gradually getting scarce."
The task of picking up the slack in policy and action has been taken up by
non-government organisations. The Lanka Rainwater Harvesting Forum, for
instance, has tried to ease the women’s water burden by donating to selected
areas pumpkin-type ferro-cement tanks that are placed above or below the
ground.
The rainwater filters into these 5,000-litre tanks from the roof during the
rainy season and can be used sparingly for about 50 days during the dry
season. So far, groups like the Forum have donated a total of 35,000
rainwater tanks.
These, however, are mere stopgap solutions that serve a very limited
population at best. In the meantime, the water crisis seems to be getting
more complex.
Forum director Thanuja Ariyananda, for one, says that the quality of water
has become an issue as well.
She cites the high mineral content in water in northern-central and eastern
parts of Sri Lanka, which she says causes "the teeth of children get
discoloured and over a prolonged process the bones get brittle".
Farmer’s wife Bandara, in fact, says that is also why she has had to go
farther to fetch water – the water in their well has a high fluoride content.
Fernando in Magombo, for her part, complains of brackish water in the
wells in her district. "That’s puts a tremendous responsibility on the women
in the household to ensure clean drinking water and hygiene," she says.
Then there is the dumping of solid waste and garbage in rivers, streams,
lakes and waterways. So is depleting groundwater resources in cities as the
few existing wells are contaminated and polluted due to their close proximity
to septic tanks.
Says Athukorala: "There is an urgent need to protect wells and recharge
wells in the city – even for other uses like washing and toilets, because pipe-
borne water resources would be a problem in the future. Here, hygiene and
health becomes a more serious issue and that load again is handled by
women." (END)
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