Water: A pipe dream

As the world observes World Water Day 2019, many people in India continue to spend most of their day ferrying water from the hand pump to their homes

An old woman carries a bucket of water from the hand pump to her house. This is the 40th time she has had to make this trip in a day. “The tube well is about 400 m from my house; by the end of the day, my arms and legs start protesting,” says Rangalata Behera, a resident of Gobindapur village in Odisha’s Bhadrak district. “It is as if the only thing I do all day is carry water back and forth,” she adds. Behera isn’t alone. In the village that is merely 150 km from the state capital Bhubaneswar, households