A film by the participants in the
Dehradun Environment Journalists' Workshop

When the hill state of Uttaranchal was founded in 2000, the Chief Minister promised each household a guaranteed supply of 40 litres of water each day within the year. But today, almost half the villages have no access to drinking water. Villagers walk kilometres to fetch water.

Manju makes four journeys through the forest each day, in order to collect 60 litres of water for her family. It takes her more than three hours.

But Uttaranchal has one of the highest rainfalls in India, and has more water than it can use. But less than one percent is harnessed for domestic consumption.

“Basically the scarcity of water in this state is not a technical problem. It is question of management,” says Ravi Chopra, the director of the People Science Institute.

“That is directly related to who owns the water.”

 Now villagers are taking things into their own hands.

Click here to watch one short extract from the film and here to see a second (or right-click to save the files to your computer). These are very large files of around 5MB each, so you will need a reasonably fast connection to the internet.