In Indira Gandhi Camp, in Kasturba Nagar, until the summer of last year, the first two hours of most weekdays belonged to water. Not to breakfast, not to school, not to the shift at the salon or the restaurant or the domestic job three lanes away. To water.
It is easy to write about water access as a policy problem. It is harder to write about it as a time problem, which is what it is, in practice, for the household that lives inside it. This piece is the second of the two.
The three walks
In a dense Delhi settlement without reliable in-lane supply, water collection tends to fall into three patterns.
The tanker queue. On days when a municipal or private tanker rolls in at a scheduled hour, the queue starts thirty minutes before. The women stand with drums. If the tanker arrives late, the queue extends into the school day and the workday. If the tanker arrives early, the household that missed the message misses the water.
The distant tap. Where a working municipal tap exists but is not inside the lane, the walk to it and back with weight can take twenty to forty minutes each way. Three trips a day is common. The load is heavy enough that older children are recruited into the work as soon as they are able. Younger children come along because there is no one to leave them with.
The paid delivery. Where the queue is untenable and the walk too long, households pay someone else to bring water. In a basti in central Delhi, a private drum delivered can cost more than a day's wage at the low end of the labour market. The households paying this are the ones with the least room to.
Most households cycle between the three depending on the day, the time, the season, and how bad the summer is that week.
What two hours a day actually adds up to
Two hours a day sounds bearable in the abstract. Compounded, it is not.
- Two hours a day, six days a week, fifty weeks a year, is six hundred hours per household per year. About three and a half working weeks.
- Across a settlement of six hundred households, it is 360,000 person-hours a year, most of them belonging to women. That is equivalent to the annual working time of about a hundred and eighty full-time workers.
- For a household earning ten thousand rupees a month at the informal wage rate for the primary earner, six hundred hours of returned time per year represents on the order of thirty to fifty thousand rupees of foregone earning capacity, or the equivalent household productivity, depending on how it is spent.
These are not clever numbers. They are the arithmetic of two hours a day.
Who pays the time
Water collection in Delhi's bastis is almost entirely a women's job. In a settlement of a hundred households, ninety-five will have the task done by the eldest daughter or the mother. The father is at his workplace by six in the morning. The son goes to school. The grandmother, where she is present, does what she can. That leaves the woman running the household.
The effect on her day is direct and unromantic. She wakes at four-thirty. She fetches water until six-thirty or seven. She then sends the children to school, cooks breakfast, cleans, and if she has an outside job, she leaves at half past eight or nine and returns at seven. The tail of her day is not shorter than it needs to be. It is exactly as long as it needs to be, plus water.
When she has a daughter of school-going age, the daughter is asked to help. Some daughters are asked to help enough that they attend school inconsistently and eventually stop. The interaction between water and girls' education is present in almost every settlement of this kind.
The morning after a pump goes in
When a community pump is installed inside the lane and handed over to residents, the change is immediate. The queue does not shorten. It disappears. The trip that was two hours becomes thirty seconds.
What happens with the returned time is not uniform. Some of it goes to the same household work that was there before, done more thoroughly. Some of it goes to work outside the home that the woman could not previously fit in her day. Some of it goes to the children whose education used to compete with the walk. Some of it goes to nothing in particular, which is fine. Rest is a valid use of returned time.
The point is not that a pump makes anyone rich. The point is that a pump gives an entire lane back the first two hours of the day. Every day. Six days a week. Every year the pump stays in service. That is a much larger effect than the cost of the intervention would suggest.
Why this is worth paying attention to
Time-poverty in Delhi's bastis is not a well-covered story. Water is a household problem. Household problems, in this country and most others, do not get the attention that supply-side infrastructure problems get. The tanker system is regulated, the pipe network is contested, the borewell debate is live. The two-hour queue at the end of them is not on any front page.
If you are a donor who thinks in terms of returns on capital, time returned to women in Delhi's bastis is one of the highest-return uses of philanthropic money we are aware of. Not because women's time is undervalued in some abstract way, though it is. Because the physical cost of returning the time is very low, and it stays returned for years.
How to help
Nikhaar Foundation funds and installs community water pumps in Delhi's underserved settlements and hands them to residents. If you want to fund the next pump or contribute more broadly, our donate page has the bank and UPI details, and our long-form piece on the economics of a community pump has the numbers in more detail. For companies routing Section 135 CSR spending, our CSR partnerships page covers the Schedule VII mapping and the documentation pack.
Frequently asked
Answers to the questions this article gets asked.
How much time do women in Delhi's bastis spend collecting water each day?
In Delhi's underserved settlements without reliable in-lane water supply, women typically spend between one and a half and two and a half hours a day collecting water, spread across two or three trips. This is the pattern in places like Indira Gandhi Camp in Kasturba Nagar before a community water pump was installed.
Why does water collection fall on women in Delhi's settlements?
Household water collection in Delhi's bastis is largely a women's job because male members of the household typically leave for outside work early and children are in school or too young to carry the load. The primary earner cannot fetch water in the morning. The task falls to the woman running the household, often with help from the eldest daughter, which affects her school attendance.
What does a community water pump change for a Delhi basti?
A community water pump installed inside a settlement and handed over to residents eliminates the daily water collection walk. A two hour task becomes a thirty second one. The returned time redistributes across additional household work, outside employment for women who could not previously fit it in, more consistent school attendance for older daughters, and rest.
How does water access affect girls' education in Delhi?
In Delhi's underserved settlements, older daughters are frequently recruited into the daily water collection walk, which affects their school attendance. Consistent absence tends to compound into disengagement and eventually withdrawal from school. Interventions that remove the walk, such as a community water pump inside the lane, have a direct and measurable effect on girls' school attendance in that lane.
How much money does a household in a Delhi basti spend on water?
A household in a Delhi basti without reliable municipal supply typically spends between one hundred and fifty and three hundred rupees a month on private tanker deliveries, more in the summer. Households earning ten to twenty thousand rupees a month feel this as a meaningful proportion of discretionary spending. A community water pump inside the lane eliminates most of this.