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Water Crisis Forcing Villages in Vidarbha Back to Open Defecation

Water Crisis Forcing Villages in Vidarbha Back to Open Defecation
Water Crisis Forcing Villages in Vidarbha Back to Open Defecation

Before sunrise in a drought-hit village of Vidarbha, residents gather at a polluted pond and begin digging small pits in the mud. They will wait hours for these pits to seep full of murky water, then line up to fill their buckets.


This is not an uncommon morning in parts of Vidarbha, a region in Maharashtra long plagued by water scarcity. In some villages, even basic drinking water is so elusive that desperate measures like collecting dirty seepage have become routine. Amid this daily scramble for water, many newly built toilets stand unused.


With wells dried up and government taps defunct, families face a stark choice to use their limited water to drink and cook, or “waste” it flushing a toilet.


The result is a troubling reversal. Villagers who once celebrated new household latrines are returning to open defecation in the fields, forced by the sheer lack of water to keep those toilets functional.


A Region Running Dry


Vidarbha’s water crisis is a longstanding and severe one, driven by erratic rainfall and recurring droughts. The region is among the worst-hit in India when it comes to water scarcity, a fact often attributed to its climate vulnerability and inadequate irrigation infrastructure.


In 2021, for instance, Vidarbha received about 11% less rainfall than normal, with some districts facing deficits as high as 25%. Such shortfalls have left rivers, reservoirs, and wells running dry faster than usual.

By the peak of summer, many villages see their local water sources completely depleted. In the Melghat area of Amravati district, families reported that the only pond in their village had turned into a muddy pit, yet they had no choice but to dig into its banks to collect whatever water trickled out. “We wake up around 4 a.m. and go to the pond to collect water for our children,” one villager explained, describing how it takes 2–3 hours for the pits to fill and how people queue up for this contaminated water.


Another elderly resident noted that they sometimes wait until late at night just to gather a few buckets of dirty water, since no government tankers or reliable taps are reaching their village.



The consequences of this water shortage go far beyond inconvenience. In parts of Vidarbha, the daily per-person water supply from all sources might be only 20–40 litres in dry months, far below the national goal of 55 litres per capita.

Villagers must ration this meagre supply for drinking, cooking, and livestock before even considering sanitation. Clean water becomes a privilege of the few, while the general population is left deprived or forced to buy water at steep prices.


Notably, Vidarbha has one of the highest rates of farmer suicides in the country, a grim statistic often linked to water scarcity crippling agriculture and livelihoods. Year after year, as fields wither and wells run dry, the water crisis cascades into food insecurity, debt, and distress migration from villages.

Many families end up relocating to urban slums where, ironically, they encounter a new set of problems: overcrowding and a lack of basic sanitation facilities. In this way, the scarcity of water pervades every aspect of life in Vidarbha, undermining health, income, and dignity in one of India’s most parched regions.


Toilets Built but Standing Idle


In recent years, India’s Swachh Bharat (Clean India) Mission led to millions of toilets being constructed across rural areas, including thousands in Vidarbha.


By October 2019, the government even declared rural India “open defecation free,” on paper, after an unprecedented nationwide sanitation drive. In Maharashtra, over 1.3 million household toilets were built from 2014 to 2016 under this campaign, and many villages in Vidarbha proudly earned the official Open Defecation-Free (ODF) status.


Yet those achievements are unravelling in the face of drought. As prolonged dry spells hit the region, the same villagers who once took pride in having toilets are now back to relieving themselves in the fields.

“Almost the entire village is back to doing the morning ritual out in the fields because there is no water to ‘waste’,” reported one account of a Vidarbha village that had earlier won a sanitation award. The hard reality is that a toilet, no matter how well built, is effectively unusable without sufficient water to flush and clean it. And when families have barely enough water to drink each day, flushing a toilet becomes an impossible luxury.


Local officials and sanitation workers acknowledge that water scarcity has dealt a serious setback to the anti-open-defecation campaign. “If a village is facing a severe shortage and even struggling to meet drinking water needs, we can’t press them to build toilet blocks. We will have to wait until it rains,” admitted a senior coordinator of the Swachh Bharat Mission in one drought-affected district.


In many officially ODF villages, there is no system to verify if residents are actually using their toilets, especially during the dry season.


The presence of a latrine in each household is enough for a village to be certified ODF, yet an insider in one tehsil observed that “I don’t think there’s any village in the district that can afford 100 percent toilet use in such a bad drought”.


In fact, field reports suggest that up to 80% of villagers revert to open defecation in some hard-hit areas despite having toilets, simply because water is too scarce to spare for flushing.

Villagers themselves articulate the dilemma plainly.


In Osmanabad (just outside Vidarbha) during the 2016 drought, a farmer calculated that his household of seven would need at least 35 litres of water per day just for minimal toilet use. “I would be able to sustain a pair of buffaloes on 35 litres of water rather than letting it go down the drain,” he said, pointing out that every drop saved was needed for animals and crops.


Others noted that families receiving tanker deliveries of 200 litres per day could not possibly allocate 60–70 litres of that for flushing toilets if five members used them twice a day.


In such conditions, even government tankers and wells only permit the bare minimum of washing and drinking. “Those who can afford to buy private tanker water… can use the toilets. At the moment, 80 percent of men are going out to the fields while women use recycled water to flush,” one village resident explained during a severe water shortage.

These accounts underscore how water scarcity is undermining sanitation gains: newly built toilets end up locked or filled with storage items, while open defecation continues as a matter of survival.


Everyday Impact on Health and Dignity

Everyday Impact on Health and Dignity
Everyday Impact on Health and Dignity

The return of open defecation in Vidarbha’s villages is not just a setback for policy goals. It has real consequences for public health and human dignity. When people relieve themselves in the open, untreated human waste can contaminate the environment and water sources.


Health experts warn that inadequate sanitation is closely linked to outbreaks of diarrhoea, cholera, typhoid and other infectious diseases, since pathogens from faeces find their way into drinking water or onto food crops.

In communities already struggling with scarce clean water, an episode of waterborne illness can be devastating. Residents of one Amravati village noted that children often fall ill after drinking the dirty pond water they collect, likely because that water is polluted partly by runoff and possibly by open defecation nearby.


These conditions create a vicious cycle. Lack of water leads to open defecation, which in turn further pollutes the limited water sources, exacerbating health risks for everyone.


The social impacts are also significant. Women and girls, in particular, bear a heavy burden when toilets are unusable.


Many women in rural Vidarbha must wait for predawn darkness or walk to isolated fields to relieve themselves, exposing them to harassment, snake bites and immense embarrassment. Research has found that open defecation poses serious threats to women’s privacy, safety, and psychological well-being. “I am 16 years old now, and I feel shy about going to the jungle. But there is no other option,” confessed a teenage girl from a village in Yavatmal, describing how frightening it was to encounter snakes and scorpions each time and how she wished her family could afford a toilet at home. Such experiences are common wherever sanitation is lacking.


In Vidarbha’s case, even where toilets exist, the water crisis often renders them useless, forcing young women like her back into unsanitary and undignified practices.

The strain on families is visible: parents worry about their children’s health and safety, and community life suffers when basic hygiene cannot be maintained. Hospitals in the region have also struggled, some rural clinics report dry taps in their lavatories, making it hard to maintain cleanliness and prevent infections.

All of this paints a picture of how deeply water and sanitation are intertwined. Simply put, without water, the promise of “Swachh Bharat” rings hollow in Vidarbha. The impressive gains in toilet construction mean little on the ground if people cannot actually use them daily.


Vidarbha’s plight highlights a fundamental reality: a toilet is only as useful as the water available to keep it running. In this rain-shadowed corner of Vidabrha, villagers are being confronted with choices no one should have to make, choosing drinking water for their families over the use of a safe toilet.


The lack of water has effectively brought open defecation back to communities that thought they had left it behind. This ongoing crisis is a sobering reminder that battles for sanitation cannot be won in isolation.


As long as wells remain dry and tankers scarce, open defecation will persist as an unfortunate necessity in Vidarbha’s villages. The sights of villagers clutching their water containers at dawn, and of abandoned latrines gathering dust, stand as evidence that water security and sanitation must go hand in hand.


Without reliable water access, even the best-intentioned toilet-building campaign cannot deliver a healthier, cleaner life. And so, each new day in Vidarbha breaks with a race for water and a walk to the fields, an emergency that demands attention, not in lofty speeches, but in the flowing taps and filled wells that the people of this region desperately await.


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The NewsDirt is a trusted source for authentic, ground-level journalism, highlighting the daily struggles, public issues, history, and local stories from Vidarbha’s cities, towns, and villages. Committed to amplifying voices often ignored by mainstream media, we bring you reliable, factual, and impactful reporting from Vidarbha’s grassroots.

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