Sandhya Kumari, 18, squats amid an assortment of buckets, gazing at the tap boisterously filling up a pitcher. It has been two days since it sputtered to life. She wonders what she’ll do with the free time — the prospects are tempting. Maybe an extra hour of Facebook, gossip with her neighbours, and who knows, a leisurely stroll in the fields?
Four months ago, Kumari, who lives in Shivhar village in Mahoba district, Uttar Pradesh, had a different routine. Filling up water for drinking and cooking meant numerous trips between the neighbourhood tube well and her kitchen courtyard, where the plastic water cans lie. “On a good day, when there isn’t too long a queue and the pump works, without too much effort on my part, the chore can take up most of my morning,” she says. Kumari can’t remember spending a day differently. As the oldest girl child in her household of seven, this responsibility was ‘naturally’ entrusted to her.
The installation of a tap in her house this year, along with 250 other households in Shivhar, has marked 2023 as an eventful year in the village. It’s the first time that every villager can turn on a fixture within their premises, without pumping for it. All of it for free.
