India’s Water Crisis & Women:
India is water-stressed due to changing weather patterns and repeated droughts. And the worst sufferers of this crisis are mostly women.
- Water scarcity in India is expected to worsen as the overall population is expected to increase to 1.6 billion by the year 2050.
- Although India has 16% of the world’s population, the country possesses only 4% of the world’s freshwater resources.
- In recent times, the water crisis in India has become very critical, affecting millions of people across India.
- As many as 256 of 700 districts in India have reported ‘critical’ or ‘overexploited’ groundwater levels according to the most recent Central Ground Water Board data (from 2017).
- Three-fourths of India’s rural families lack access to piped, drinkable water and must rely on unsafe sources.
- India has become the world’s largest extractor of groundwater, accounting for 25% of the total. Some 70% of our water sources are contaminated and our major rivers are dying because of pollution.
