Anshu Gupta

Men cleaning and digging soil to revive a well in Bundelkhand (2016)

The region of Bundelkhand has seen a series of droughts in the last couple of years resulting in extreme scarcity of water. All the water sources including the hand pumps in the districts had dried up*.

It is strange how sometimes we forget how we may have something so crucial for the other but of no use to us. This is one such example, when we were visiting this village in Bundelkhand we were constantly hearing problems of water scarcity and the long distances women had to travel to fetch water, it was then that we stumbled on this well. The dampness on the soil was visible from ground meaning that water was not much below, the only issue was that the well was located on a private land. The owner of the land had not used it for quite some time as he had moved on to modern methods of hand pumps etc, we persuaded the man and then revived this well for the use of the entire community.

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