The Girl Must Study: A Grandmother's Walk Against Generational Thirst In Bundelkhand

Banda: Adhrori village, Banda, in Bundelkhand — Every dawn, 68-year-old Sukhrani waits at the edge of her courtyard.

She no longer walks to fetch water. Age has taken that from her. Instead, she watches her daughter-in-law Rajkumari disappear down the dusty road with three pitchers, two of them balanced on her head and one carried in hand, followed by 17-year-old granddaughter Nisha — who should be preparing for school examination instead.

The wait lasts nearly one hour. Only when they return with enough water for the day does Sukhrani allow herself to relax.

She has spent most of her life waiting for water.

Villagers fetching water from dirty nullah

She was 18 when the first drought hit in 1967. Two consecutive years of failed monsoons dried the water bodies. She walked eight kilometres to a river that had itself turned to mud. Her mother-in-law died three months later — not from thirst, but from the fever that came after drinking from a contaminated well. Sukhrani never forgot the smell: like something rotting.

In 2026, she still wakes at dawn. She waits at the edge of her courtyard. Her daughter-in-law and granddaughter will return in over an hour, after walking slightly more than two kilometres to the only functioning borewell in the block.

She remembers believing that her children would never have to endure the same hardship.

They did.

Mother

: Rajkumari is 44. She wakes at 4 am. Her body does not need an alarm. It knows.

"We start early," Rajkumari said. "Otherwise, the heat is unbearable."

This summer, Banda has recorded the highest temperatures in the country. For weeks, the mercury has stayed above 45 degrees Celsius.The Jal Mission promised her pipes.

First, she washes the earthen pitchers - three of them all of different sizes. The largest goes on her head. The second balances on top of it. The third fits into the crook of her left arm.

She carries them like this every day.

The weight presses down on her head. It presses into her spine. It feels like a sahukar’s debt, which she knows will never end.

In 2023, the block officer came with a camera and a ribbon. They cut it. The taps flowed for three days. Then they went dry. The pipeline was laid, but the pump never arrived. The budget was approved, but the contractor vanished.

Rajkumari does not know the details. She knows the result: her daughter skips school classes to help her. Her husband migrated to Lucknow three years ago, working as a construction labourer. He sends ₹8,000 a month, which is not enough to meet family’s basic requirements.

She walks the same path every day. The same cracked earth. The same men who watch from the roadside. Once, a dog chased her. She stopped fearing pitchers will fall and break. She cannot afford new pitchers which cost between Rs 50 and Rs 80. “There is a saying in our village. May your husband die, but pitcher should not break,” she said signifying importance of pitchers in their lives.

The physical toll is invisible: her knees ache, her spine curves, her hands are swollen from the weight. She doesn't tell her daughter. She doesn't want her to know this is normal.

Daughter

: At 17, Nisha is the first in her family to finish high school. She wants to study nursing. She wants to leave. But several mornings every week, books give way to pitchers or plastic buckets. She skips classes to help her mother fetch water, carrying the same weight that once rested on Sukhrani's shoulders.

"I have carried water for ten years," Nisha said, looking at her cracked palms. "I have carried it longer than I have carried a pen."

She has read in newspaper, which comes to her school, that 62 lakh people have migrated from Bundelkhand since 2005 due to drought. She knows that women walk eight kilometres a day to fetch water. She knows that her mother's health is deteriorating from the weight.

But she doesn't know what she'll do when the exam comes.

Three generations apart — grandmother, mother and granddaughter — have lived different lives. But every one of them has begun the day with the same struggle.

For Sukhrani, water was once lost to drought. For Rajkumari, it disappeared behind unfulfilled promises. For Nisha, it is slowly taking away her education.

In this corner of Bundelkhand, the inheritance passed from one generation of women to the next has not been land or jewellery. It has been the daily burden of finding water — and the hope that the next generation would finally be the last to carry it.

For this family, the burden of water has passed from grandmother to mother to daughter, surviving changes in governments, drought relief programmes and repeated assurances that drinking water would soon reach every household. The promises have changed with every election.

The walk has not.

Unfulfilled Promise

The Har Ghar Jal scheme launched under the Jal Jeevan Mission in 2019 promised piped water to approximately 2.67 crore rural households in Uttar Pradesh. According to official data, over 90% of rural households across the seven drought-prone districts of Bundelkhand have been provided with functional tap water connections.

The facts are different at ground level.

Raja Bhaiya of Vidya Dham Samiti, who works with villagers in Banda and Patha areas, said taps are there but there is no water. "Plastic pipes can be seen jutting out of the ground, but water has not trickled from them. At some spots, the pipes are buried under heaps of mud and sand," he told this reporter.

At Nibi village in Banda district, underground water pipelines have been laid connecting 94 households. None of them gets water, says Raja Bhaiya.

Phulla, a resident of Nibi village, said: "A year has passed since the pipeline was laid, but we are yet to get water. We lodged complaints with officials and raised the issue in village committee meetings, but the work remained incomplete."

Mamata, another villager, said: "Taps in a majority of households are dry."

A majority of these villagers belong to Dalit communities and Other Backward Classes. They work on agricultural land for their livelihood. "We cannot afford boring and pumps to collect underground water. We are dependent on the government water supply scheme for potable water," said Vishwanath Prasad, a former gram pradhan.

In early February this year, Brijbhushan Rajput, the BJP MLA from Charkhari, along with local gram pradhans and party supporters, blocked Uttar Pradesh Jal Shakti minister Swatantra Dev Singh's convoy on the highway to draw attention to the problem. The overhead tanks and water pipelines are leaking at several spots, he said.

Countering the allegations, the Jal Shakti minister Swatantra Dev Singh asserted that except for some villages, households in a majority of villages are receiving water supply. A large portion of roads cut for laying pipelines had been repaired, he added. In some areas, roads had caved in due to rain and waterlogging.

The Audit of Paani Samiti

A scathing audit of the Jal Jeevan Mission revealed that Uttar Pradesh accounts for 84% of all complaints filed against the scheme nationally — 14,264 out of 17,036.

The findings: poor construction, financial irregularities, taps without water, and village committees that exist only on paper.

The audit found that many villages have pipelines and household tap connections, but water either does not reach homes or is supplied irregularly. This gap is particularly evident in water-stressed regions, where women continue to walk long distances to fetch water despite official claims of widespread tap water coverage.

A key concern raised by the audit is the poor functioning of Village Water and Sanitation Committees (VWSCs), also known as Pani Samitis. These committees are meant to plan, monitor and maintain village water supply systems, resolve complaints, collect user charges and oversee operation and maintenance. However, in many villages they were either constituted late, met infrequently or lacked the authority to monitor contractors and enforce accountability.

Sukhrani does not know what ₹8.69 lakh crore means. She knows what no water means.

The audit targeted 171 officials and 120 contractors. Penalties were imposed. Inquiries were opened.

The women of Adhrori do not read audits. They do not track budget allocations. They do not know that ₹8.69 lakh crore has been sanctioned, or that 14,264 complaints have been filed.

What they know is this: the sun rises. The earth cracks. The cans weigh twenty kilograms each. And the distance to water is measured not in kilometres, but in the number of daughters who will skip classes to fetch water.

Sukhrani knows the truth: the water was never the problem. The problem was the promise.

Rajkumari knows the truth: the water is the problem. The problem is the weight.

Nisha knows the truth: the choice is the problem. The problem is the future.

The Last Walk

Rajkumari recounts that in mid of March, one day, Nisha did not return from the borewell. She ran back along the cracked road, her empty cans clattering behind her. She found her daughter sitting on the ground, face buried in her hands, the water cans untouched beside her. Nisha looked up, and for the first time in seventeen years, Rajkumari saw something she had never seen in her daughter's eyes: not exhaustion, not anger, but surrender.

“The school called," Nisha whispered. "They said if I miss one more day, I cannot sit for the board exams."

Rajkumari sat down on the ground next to her daughter. She did not speak. She had no words left. She had inherited thirst from her mother-in-law. She had passed it on to her daughter. And now, for the first time, she wondered if the true drought was not of water — but of the lies that had made them believe help was coming.

That evening, Sukhrani watched them return, empty-handed.

She did not ask why.

She simply turned towards the courtyard wall, sat there for a while and women of two other generations sit under the neem tree. There was silence. No one spoke a word.

Sukhrani looked at her daughter-in law and grand daughter. Then she picked up her walking stick and declared: "I will go tomorrow,".

Rajkumari shook her head. "Amma, you cannot walk."

"I walked before you were born," Sukhrani replied. "I will walk after you are gone. The water does not care who carries it. But the girl — the girl must study."

That night, under a sky that had not shed rain in months, three women made a decision. Sukhrani would resume the walk alone. Rajkumari would work double shifts in the fields. Nisha would go back to school and not miss another day.

It was not a solution. It was not justice. It was not the tap that had been promised.

It was simply what women have always done in Bundelkhand: survive.

Dawn, Again

The next morning, Sukhrani stood at the edge of the courtyard at 4 a.m. — not waiting, but leaving. Her shadow stretched long across the dry earth. Behind her, the house stood still. Inside, Nisha lay awake, listening to her grandmother's slow footsteps fade into the dark.

She closed her eyes and whispered a prayer she had never prayed before: Ram ji, exam pass karwa do

This is not a story of triumph.

This is the story of three women who refused to wait any longer — not for water, not for justice, not for a government that measures success in pipelines instead of throats.

They are still walking.

But one of them, at least, is walking towards an examination hall instead of a borewell.

And in Bundelkhand, where hope has been a drought for fifty years, that small step forward could transform her life.