Dalits’ Access to Water: Patterns of Deprivation and Discrimination

Dalits or Scheduled Castes (SCs) of India still face multiple deprivation and discrimination with regard to access to natural resources.These disabilities are most pronounced with regard to access to water. In rural India, access to an imperative resource like water shows differential pattern across regions, where poverty, physical separation of hamlets, ideas of purity and pollution, poor access to government welfare programmes, discrimination in access to public water bodies and structures and so on play a critical role.The article focuses on probing current status of deprivation and discrimination of dalits’ access to water for domestic use across various states with the help of selected indicators, which can reveal this complex phenomenon. As the study covered different ecological zones, it also explores a relatively less studied domain—linkages of water scarcity and dalits’ discrimination and deprivation. The findings from the survey show variable expressions of these features in different regions and specific socio-cultural contexts, revealing sociological nature of water in rural India.