Women queue to fill their buckets, Bolangir, Odisha, India 18.1.2022. ©Nairita Roy Chaudhuri
Most small farmers in rural India directly depend on rainwater for agricultural production and subsistence livelihoods. However, climate change is intensifying droughts, threatening crop productivity, the food and livelihood security of agrarian farmers, and increasing their risks of hunger and malnutrition. Recognizing climate change as a health and existential crisis, adapting to water scarcity and droughts is essential for the sustainable well-being of rural communities, alongside mitigation efforts. The health consequences of climate change intersect with gender, as rural women bear the primary responsibility for ensuring water security for domestic consumption and performing care or reproductive work.
In my doctoral research, I employed ethnographic methods to explore how law can enable rural communities living in postcolonial societies, examined in particular within the framework of gender and colonial power relations, to sustainably adapt to droughts and water scarcity. Conducting fieldwork in the semi-arid belts of rural parts of West Bengal (Puruliya district) and Odisha (Bolangir, Bargarh, and Rayagada districts) between December 2021 and May 2022, I explored the intersections of water (in)security and gendered labor. With over three hundred participants, I qualitatively analyzed climate-affected small farmers’ accounts of water sourcing, their reflections on water’s domestic and agricultural uses, and the gendered division of water-related labor and time.