The Labour of Thirst
In Indian cities that lack reliable piped water supply, there is an invisible workforce that fills the gap. It is almost entirely female.
Women and girls wake before dawn to queue at hand-pumps. They carry 20-litre jerry cans on their heads for distances that urban planners would never ask a man to walk. They manage household water storage — calculating how much is left, rationing consumption, negotiating with neighbours over shared sources.
This labour is uncosted, uncounted, and systematically excluded from official narratives of water governance.
Caste and the Geography of Pipes
| Caste category | % with piped connection | Avg. distance to nearest water source |
|---|---|---|
| Upper caste (OC) | 78% | 45 m |
| OBC | 61% | 110 m |
| SC/ST | 29% | 340 m |
| Muslim minority | 34% | 290 m |
The pattern is not coincidental. Municipal water supply expansion has consistently followed caste geography — extending first to upper-caste neighbourhoods with greater political representation on ward committees.
When Infrastructure Is Ideology
Infrastructure is never neutral. Every pipe that terminates at a ward boundary is a political decision. Every borehole drilled by a monastery rather than the municipality is a statement about whose water security matters.
The concept of infrastructural citizenship — developed by scholars like Nikhil Anand — helps here. It describes how access to urban infrastructure becomes a mechanism through which certain populations are recognised as full urban citizens, and others are not.
In Bodh Gaya, full infrastructural citizenship — the right to reliable, piped, safe water at home — is a privilege distributed along lines of caste, religion, and gender.
What Women Said
Three quotes from my fieldwork that stay with me:
"I don't have time to be sick. Who will bring the water?" — Woman, 34, Musahar neighbourhood
"The monastery has a machine that puts water up. We still carry it on our heads. Both are in the same town." — Woman, 52, peripheral settlement
"My daughter doesn't go to school on Mondays. Monday is the day the hand-pump breaks." — Woman, 40, lower ward
These are not exceptional stories. They are structurally produced conditions.
Moving Forward
Research alone does not change infrastructure. But it can make visible what has been made invisible — the daily labour, the political choices, the human cost of a governance system that treats water as a service for some and a burden for others.
My ongoing PhD research is trying to build a political ecology of these inequalities — not just to document them, but to trace their mechanisms, so that intervention becomes possible.