‘O ki Rohedoi, kaxotekolohloi, abelibelika, paani aniboloi, okole okole, nejabaghatoloi…’
‘O Rohdoi, swaying the pitcher on your hips gracefully,
at twilight’s tender hour, do not go alone to the ghat to fetch water…’
This evokes a poetic nostalgia of an Assamese woman’s timeless daily ritual.
Once, Assamese cinema and fiction captured this golden scene: young women draped in mekhela chador, brass pitchers swaying on their hips, laughter echoing along village paths as they walked to the river to fetch water. It was a tableau of joy, romance, and innocence. Even today, in Assam’s remote hamlets and across rural India, this familiar image continues to exist.
Now imagine a stark interruption. A hand reaches for the tap and finds only dry silence. That single moment unsettles everything.
Water shapes lives everywhere, but not equally. For many of us, water flows so effortlessly through our daily routines that we barely notice it. It is present in our mornings, our meals, and our everyday lives—so constant that it feels like a given. Elsewhere, this ease does not exist. There are women who spend hours each day walking long distances to fetch water, and girls who miss school not because of a lack of books or dreams, but because there are no safe sanitation facilities or clean water. What we call routine, they call privilege.
Now imagine if this were your everyday reality. For billions of people, it already is.
World Water Day 2026, with its theme ‘Water and Gender’, is a reminder to look beyond our own taps and confront the inequalities that shape access to this basic resource. It highlights a powerful and often overlooked connection between water and gender, showing how access—or the lack of it—continues to shape lives in unequal ways. It underscores a stark truth: the global water crisis is also a gender crisis.
Across the world, women and girls are the primary managers of household water, responsible for collection, sanitation, and family health. The scale of the global crisis is vast and deeply unequal. According to a WHO and UNICEF report from August 2025, around 2.1 billion people—one in four globally—still lack access to safe drinking water. This presents a major challenge to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 6.
Unequal access to water reinforces social and economic inequalities, with women bearing a disproportionate burden. In many parts of the developing world, women and girls spend hours each day collecting water. This limits time for education, livelihoods, and rest. This “time poverty” is further compounded by safety risks during long journeys to water sources and by limited participation in water governance systems. Climate change intensifies these challenges by increasing the frequency of droughts, floods, and water contamination, making access even more uncertain for vulnerable communities.
In India, the water crisis reflects both scarcity and excess. Nearly 600 million people face high to extreme water stress due to overuse, population pressure, and climate variability. For rural women, this often means daily drudgery and long walks to fetch water, at the cost of education and income opportunities. In urban areas, the challenge shifts to access to safe and uncontaminated water, particularly for poorer communities. National initiatives like the Jal Jeevan Mission have made significant progress in providing tap water to households. However, recurring floods and climate-related disruptions continue to undermine these gains, exposing the fragility of water systems.
This reality is especially visible in Assam. Each year, floods inundate vast areas, contaminate drinking water sources, and displace hundreds of thousands of people. Climate change has made these floods more erratic, frequent, and severe. Wells, tube wells, and groundwater sources are often polluted by floodwaters mixed with sewage and waste, leading to outbreaks of waterborne diseases. For communities already struggling with limited access to safe water, floods turn scarcity into crisis, often leaving families without clean water for weeks.
Within this context of recurring disaster, women face the greatest burdens. They manage households during and after floods, secure water from unsafe sources, care for children and the elderly, and navigate life in overcrowded relief camps with inadequate sanitation. Health risks increase significantly, ranging from waterborne diseases to infections linked to poor hygiene. Pregnant women face disruptions in healthcare, while girls often drop out of school to support household survival.
Livelihood losses deepen these inequalities. Many women in Assam depend on agriculture, livestock, and weaving—sectors that are highly vulnerable to floods and erosion. When fields are submerged and homes destroyed, income sources disappear overnight. With men often migrating for work, women are left to manage recovery with limited support. Displacement due to river erosion forces many into uncertain and unsafe migration, increasing vulnerability to exploitation.
Flood relief camps are often overcrowded, poorly lit, and lack basic sanitation. These conditions leave women and girls particularly vulnerable. In such fragile environments, the risks of gender-based violence, trafficking, and child marriage increase sharply. When floods destroy homes, crops, and livelihoods, families face severe economic distress. Traffickers exploit this vulnerability by offering false promises of jobs in cities. At the same time, prolonged school closures push many girls out of education, increasing the likelihood of unsafe migration or early marriage as coping strategies.
With community networks disrupted and protection systems weakened, these risks often remain unchecked. The psychological impact—including trauma, anxiety, and stress—is rarely addressed. This highlights the need for disaster response to go beyond immediate relief. It must ensure safe shelters, strengthen monitoring systems, prioritise child protection, and support sustainable livelihoods to prevent such crises from deepening.
What becomes clear is that floods and climate change are not gender-neutral. They deepen existing inequalities, placing women and girls at greater risk while continuing to exclude them from decision-making in water management and disaster planning. Despite being primary stakeholders in water use, women remain underrepresented in policy and governance structures. If water governance does not centre women, it cannot be truly effective. The way forward lies not only in strengthening infrastructure, but also in ensuring equity, safety, and voice.
The message of World Water Day 2026 is both urgent and transformative. Water continues to flow, but so do the inequities it carries. The challenge before us is not simply to bring water closer to people, but to bring justice into how water is accessed and managed. Reimagining water governance through a gender lens is essential. Equitable access to water is not just a technical or environmental concern—it is fundamentally a question of justice. Empowering women as decision-makers, investing in resilient infrastructure, and addressing the social dimensions of water access can transform vulnerability into resilience.
In places like Assam, where water defines both life and loss, this shift is essential. Women and water continue to shape each other in profound ways.
Rubee B Das is a communication and gender specialist at the Flood and River Erosion Management Agency of Assam (FREMAA), with extensive experience spanning the media and development sectors.