How Water Scarcity in the Himalayan Northeast Regions is a Women's Crisis Above All Else

Ghanashyam Singh Yurembam Assistant Professor Soil and Water Conservation Engineering Department

"If I go after water, I have to sacrifice my livelihood. If I try to earn a wage, my family stays thirsty."

The Paradox of the Wet Mountains

The eight states of India's Northeast: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura, and Sikkim are the wettest lands on the planet. Cherrapunji and Mawsynram in Meghalaya hold global records for annual rainfall exceeding 11,000 to 12,000 millimetres. The mighty Brahmaputra and countless glacier-fed rivers thread their way through these mountains. However, in village after village nestled into the Eastern Himalayan folds, women get up early to wait in queue at decreasing springs, often for hours on end for a trickle of water just sufficient for a day domestic need. This is the paradox of the wet mountains: a feminised crisis of scarcity at the family level and a macro-scale abundance.

On World Water Day 2026, the whole community is invited to recognise a basic reality which centers on the theme of "Water and Gender": water insecurity impacts women differently. In the Himalayan Northeast, women bear the brunt of this burden, which keeps communities trapped in cycles of poverty and disempowerment, cuts wings, and deteriorates health.

The Gendered Weight of Water

Globally, women spend an estimated 200 million hours every single day collecting water (UNICEF,2016), which is a wastage of their valuable time. In the Indian Himalayan context, this burden is magnified by the geographic scarcity resulting from altitude, terrain, socio-cultural norms and the progressive drying of natural springs.

According to a landmark 2019 World Health Organization study, securing universal home water access in India would save almost 5.5 crore hours per day, which are presently largely spent by women and girls collecting water, in villages due to poor piped infrastructure or without piped supply, a woman may spend around 3 to 6 hours a day walking steep mountain paths, balancing heavy vessels, sometimes with infants strapped to their backs.

KEY DATA: Water, Gender & the Northeast India (Selected Indicators)

Sources: JJM Dashboard 2024; NITI Aayog IHR Springs Report 2018; Springer Discover Water (Manipur study) 2024; ScienceDirect Dhara Vikas Study 2024.

The Silent Emergency: Three Million Springs on the Brink

Mountain springs are the lifeblood of the Indian Himalayan Region (IHR). A 2018 NITI Aayog report documented approximately five million springs across India, of which nearly three million lie in the IHR alone. In Meghalaya, every village in the state depends on springs for drinking, irrigation, and livestock. In Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Uttarakhand, and the hill districts of Assam and West Bengal, springs are often the sole source of potable water.

Across the Indian Himalayas, spring discharge is declining due to land use change, deforestation, increased development pressure, and the compounding effects of climate change. A survey of 300 local governments in Nepal conditions mirrored on the Indian side of the Eastern Himalayan arc found in their study that springs had dried up in 74% of local government units, with medium to severe problems in 44% of cases. Road construction was identified as the leading cause, followed by seismic activity and climate change (Thapa, B et al., 2023).

Despite rising population demand, spring sources in Sikkim are "alarmingly" drying up in places like Singtam (Sharma, G et al., 2020). Residents of Kalimpong, which is located in the hill area of West Bengal just across the state border, have to pay up to INR 20,000 for piped connections, which is well above the means of the poorest households, due to severe water shortages that occur year-round. A comprehensive study that examined 339 households in eight Sikkim towns that depended on roughly 63 perennial springs was also published in journal domain of Science Direct (2024). Prior to the intervention, a shocking finding revealed that only 24.1% of homes had year-round access to water, indicating the severity of chronic scarcity despite the region's reputation for rainfall. The programme used nature-based solutions to recharging catchment areas, reducing surface runoff, and allowing greater percolation to underground aquifers which resulted in a 30–40% increase in spring discharge. Another study, published in Springer's Discover Water journal (October 2024) examined villages in and around Nongpok Sekmai in Manipur. The study found these villages continued to lack safe drinking water and also traditional open wells, long relied upon by women for morning collection, were found to be contaminated. The study assessed a crucial secondary burden: mothers who had access to water on-site spent a lot less time collecting water, allowing them to devote more time to childcare, employment that generates income, and education. However, the daily "water walk" took up the productive hours of the day for those without access. Villagers reported growing financial strain due to the cost of treating waterborne diseases, a public health burden that mostly falls on women who are in charge of household health. Another story of Meghalaya's Tribal Women and Climate-Driven Water Stress published in the Indian Journal of Gender Studies examined 10 villages of Meghalaya during episodes of extreme climate variability. The matrilineal Khasi and Jaintia communities of Meghalaya are often cited as examples of women's relative empowerment in the Northeast. However, when drought and erratic rainfall struck, the study found that while both men and women were affected, women bore disproportionate consequences because water collection is often considered as women's work regardless of social structure. As springs weakened and streams receded, women's already-demanding schedules of paddy cultivation, fishing, forest product collection, and childcare were further stretched. The study explicitly concluded that 'extreme climate variability affects both sexes but with different consequences. An associated table on water burden on women is also presented for a structural overview

WATER BURDEN ON WOMEN: A STRUCTURAL OVERVIEW

Voices from the Mountains

Field testimonies collected by researchers and journalists across the Himalayan Northeast paint a consistent picture. In Sikkim's spring-dependent villages, women describe waking before dawn, joining queues that form in temperatures well below freezing, waiting for the slow trickle that determines the day's schedule. In Manipur's hill districts, women describe rationing drinking water against washing water, against livestock water, against the needs of a sick child.

In Uttarakhand, conservationist Bachi Singh succinctly described the structural injustice, whose environmental conditions closely resemble those of the eastern hill states: the women of those mountains spend their mornings fetching what is left after the water is extracted for tourism and development. A similar thread unites these testimonials across geographical boundaries: women who physically suffer from water scarcity are also the ones who are not allowed to participate in the discussions that determine water policy.

Where Equality Must Flow: A Policy Roadmap

World Water Day 2026's call to action is specific: close the gap between women's role as water managers and their exclusion from water governance. For the Himalayan Northeast, this demands a set of targeted, context-sensitive interventions.

1.  Mandatory Women's Leadership in Water Bodies

The Jal Jeevan Mission mandate of 50% women in Pani Samitis must be enforced with real accountability with not only nominal membership but genuine decision-making authority. Gram Sabha resolutions must require women's sign-off on water infrastructure decisions.

2.  Emergency Spring Rejuvenation Programme for the Eastern Himalayas

Sikkim's Dhara Vikas model must be scaled across the NE hill states as a central government-backed programme. The NITI Aayog has already recommended this; political will must now follow. With approximately 3 million springs in the IHR, even partial rejuvenation would transform millions of women's daily lives.

3.  Water Quality as a Women's Health Priority

Women are most at danger due to the contamination of open wells, as reported in Manipur. The Northeast hill areas should be given priority in JJM's water testing program, and women-led testing committees should be provided with resources and the power to act on results.

4.  Climate-Water-Gender Nexus in State Planning

A gender-disaggregated water security chapter must be included in the climate action plans of every state in the Northeast. Women are already traveling farther due to climate change, and spring discharge is decreasing. Gender-blind adaptation is not possible.

5.  Time-Use Data and Invisible Labour Recognition

India's National Statistical Office must include water-fetching hours in time-use surveys for the NE hill states. The WHO's estimate of 5.5 crore hours saved daily under full JJM coverage must be translated into regional equivalents — making the economic value of women's unpaid water labour visible to policymakers.

6.  JJM 2.0 Sustainability: Prevent the Relapse

The extension of JJM to 2028 under JJM 2.0, with its focus on service sustainability rather than just infrastructure installation, is welcome. For the Northeast, this means robust Gram Panchayat capacity building, maintenance budgets, and the digital monitoring of every connection through the Sujalam Bharat framework. A tap that doesn't flow is worse than no tap — it destroys trust and returns women to the spring.

Conclusion: The Spring as a Mirror

The mountain spring is more than a water source. It is a social institution in the communities of the Himalayan Northeast, where women gather at dawn to exchange news, help one another through hardship, and work together to manage a resource that is frequently overlooked by male-dominated governance. The spring is where gender inequality becomes most physical: it is the place where the extra two hours a girl spends collecting water instead of studying becomes, years later, the reason she has no voice in the committee that decides whether the spring gets revived.

World Water Day 2026 tells us that where water flows, equality grows. The women of Salga revived their spring with spades and science. The women of Sikkim's Dhara Vikas villages proved that spring rejuvenation increases household water access from 24% to something approaching sufficiency. The women of Nongpok Sekmai are still waiting for a government that has promised them clean water for years.

The springs of the Eastern Himalayas are drying. The question is not whether we have the technology or the programmes to revive them — we do. The question is whether we have the political courage to put the women who carry the burden of their drying at the centre of the solution.