A parched and thirsty countryside

In Alirajpur, it’s a long walk to the water

Once living next to the abundant waters of the Narmada, displaced residents in Sugat and Jhandana now struggle to fill their pots

August 22, 2025 | Rohit J

In Marathwada: ‘A person dies but debt doesn’t’

Sanjeevani Bedage struggles to get a pension from a Maharashtra government scheme five years after first seeking it, even while repaying a huge loan taken by her late husband from a private moneylender

August 22, 2025 | Ira Deulgaonkar

Water: simply a matter of caste

Access to the village handpump in Palamu, Jharkhand is not for everyone, definitely not if you are a Musahar Dalit. It's not just water, even access to state rations and jobs is a challenge

April 05, 2025 | Ashwini Kumar Shukla

The water tanker

Access to the village handpump in Palamu, Jharkhand is not for everyone, definitely not if you are a Musahar Dalit. It's not just water, even access to state rations and jobs is a challenge

December 25, 2024 | Urja

The search for water

In Satara district of Maharashtra, a film on the acute water crisis

August 13, 2024 | Achyutanand Dwivedi and Prabhat Sinha

Water: not any drop to drink

As summer advances, there is fear and apprehension about the availability of water, especially in rural India. On March 22, World Water Day, PARI presents the many inequalities and injustices in access to clean drinking water – a basic right, but not for everyone

March 22, 2024 | PARI Team

Kolhapur district's water crisis

In Maharashtra's Uchgaon village, groundwater levels have dropped sharply. A short film

July 7, 2023 | Jaysing Chavan

Walking the thin line for water in Jhabua

July 21, 2021 | P. Sainath

Fetching water with Dali and her donkey

Every day, Dali Bada, an Adivasi wage labourer in Rajasthan’s water-scarce Udaipur district, undertakes exhausting downhill and uphill treks with her donkey to bring water for her family

November 20, 2019 | Sramana Sabnam

‘Clean water is a luxury we cannot afford’

A poor monsoon last year added to longer-term causes and dried up the water sources of Galtare early this year, forcing the women of this village in Palghar district to walk 25 kms a day to collect drinking water

June 28, 2019 | Shraddha Agarwal

The old man and the lonely village

S. Kandasamy is the solitary resident of Meenakshipuram in Tamil Nadu’s Thoothukudi district – a village of 1,135 people just eight years ago. Everyone else left, driven by an acute water crisis

June 26, 2019 | Kavitha Muralidharan

Prahlad's painful choice: cows or guavas?

An escalating drought in Marathwada has left even relatively big farmers struggling to stay afloat, trying to buy water for crops and cattle, and giving up when the money runs out, as it has for many in Beed district

June 3, 2019 | Jaideep Hardiker

A flood of assessments, a drought of humanity

Watch P. Sainath, Founder Editor, PARI, speak of a redefinition of drought that will hit farmers hard

November 15, 2018 | P. Sainath

Mandya's polls: farmers dry on water and hope

With barely 24 hours to go for voting, farmers in Karnataka’s Mandya district might vote in large numbers, but they remain unconvinced by the promises made by major political parties

May 11, 2018 | Vishaka George

Marathwada's troubled waters harm your bones

Recurring droughts in Marathwada have forced people in villages like Sawarkhed to drink fluoride-contaminated groundwater from borewells, which has inflicted debilitating fluorosis on many

January 12, 2018 | Parth M.N.

Memories of water

A steady decrease in rainfall, the switch to water-intensive cash crops and ever-increasing borewells have lowered the water table in Nagarur village of Anantapur, leaving farmers struggling to keep their crops alive

August 24, 2017 | Sahith M. and Rahul M.

Between life and death – a drought

The farmers of Thayanur village, Tamil Nadu, are facing a huge crisis that transcends the drought – and as the crisis deepens across the Cauvery delta, some have died due to shock, many have committed suicide

July 25, 2017 | Jaideep Hardikar

At a '100-day' site, the elderly battle drought

In Tamil Nadu's once-fertile Cauvery delta, a long and severe drought has wrecked farming. In many villages, the young have migrated for work and the elderly are doing backbreaking labour to earn some money

July 20, 2017 | Jaideep Hardikar

Distress and death in the delta

A long drought in the Cauvery delta in Tamil Nadu has triggered a series of farmers' deaths due to heart attack. The state denies agrarian distress is the cause, but many families have a different story to tell

July 18, 2017 | Jaideep Hardikar

‘We don’t get water, you do’

Women and girls of the fishing community in Killabandar village, Palghar district, spend hours scraping the bottom of a well for drinking water, and resent that their region’s water is diverted to Mumbai city

July 6, 2017 | Samyukta Shastri

‘Even in the heat, there is some guilt if I drink the water…’

June 29, 2017 | Parth M.N.

Wells of despair

An unregulated borewell economy thrives through the dry summers in Osmanabad district of Marathwada, with agents and rig owners cashing in on the desperation of farmers to find water at any depth, any cost

June 16, 2017 | Parth M.N.

Sinking wells, sunk in debt

Every day, a half-complete well reminds Karbhari Jadhav of Ganori village of his loans, mortgaged land, debts, and labour, because pay-offs and visits to government offices for years did not bring any sanctioned funds

April 26, 2017 | Parth M.N.

Up against a stone wall – the Wadars at Vasai

The Wadars of Maharashtra are stoneworkers who travel across India to restore monuments, many forced off their land by drought. At Vasai Fort north of Mumbai, they speak of their gruelling work and sense of despair

February 20, 2017 | Samyukta Shastri

The sacred waters of a tanker

Maharashtra’s water crisis continues even if media coverage of it dries up with the onset of the rains

June 24, 2016 | P. Sainath

The house that Phule's family built

Katgun village in Satara district, where Jyotiba Phule’s ancestral home survives, is not driven by his thirst for knowledge, education and justice. It is driven by thirst

June 7, 2016 | P. Sainath

Source of the rivers, scams of the rulers

Why rivers run dry while money floods the system in Maharashtra. A journey downstream the Krishna river

May 25, 2016 | P. Sainath

Drilling holes in the Thirst Economy

As the borewells go deeper in Maharashtra, there have been worrying instances of ‘paleo-historic storages’ being breached

April 7, 2016 | P. Sainath

The deep water crisis

Rig operators from Tamil Nadu are responding to a desperate demand from farmers across India, but with grave consequences for groundwater supplies

April 7, 2016 | P. Sainath

When water flows like money

If drought is making many in Osmanabad struggle for survival, it is also boosting a 24-hour trade that thrives on scarcity

April 7, 2016 | P. Sainath

Tankers and the economy of thirst

The water markets of Marathwada are booming, and in the town of Jalna alone, tanker owners can reach sales of close to Rs. 1 crore each day

April 6, 2016 | P. Sainath

How the other half dries

Water-guzzling crops, water parks, luxury pools – they are all connected to Maharashtra’s drying lakes and rivers. Who owns or controls this resource will be even more crucial now

December 20, 2014 | P. Sainath