Caste discrimination intensifies as climate crisis deepens water scarcity in India

In the early hours of a May morning, when the sun was still climbing toward what would become a day of crushing heat, Mamta set out from her home carrying three empty plastic buckets. The walk to the nearest handpump in her village in Jalaun district, in India's Bundelkhand region, was only a few hundred metres. But it was a journey she would make as many as ten times before the day ended. Temperatures in parts of Bundelkhand were already soaring past 40 degrees Celsius, and they would climb higher still.

Mamta is a member of the Valmiki community, part of the Dalit groups that India's centuries-old caste system once branded as "untouchable" and that continue to face discrimination today. The taps installed under a government drinking water scheme in her village of roughly 1,000 people had been dry for two years. The handpumps were all that remained. But using them came with an unspoken rule: she had to wait. If members of the village's dominant castes were at the pump, Mamta would not approach. She would stand back and wait until they finished, filled their containers, and left. Sometimes, after they departed, upper-caste residents would pour water over the pump to cleanse it—a ritual of purification that had been happening, she said, for decades.

Bundelkhand is a semi-arid plateau that spans parts of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, a region so chronically parched that it has become almost synonymous with India's water crisis. Between 2002 and 2016, it endured several major droughts. The rocky terrain stores little groundwater. Rainfall is erratic. And temperatures have been rising across nearly the entire region for more than a century, with recent summers pushing toward 48 degrees Celsius. As heat intensifies and water becomes scarcer, researchers and residents say an old inequality is being sharpened into something more acute. Dalits who have long faced barriers to water access are now encountering those barriers more frequently, more intensely, and under conditions of genuine physical hardship.

About 50 kilometres away, in Shahjahanpur, a man named Shiv described the same experience. Members of his community would not approach a handpump while dominant-caste families were using it. "No matter how hot it is, even if we have to wait for hours for one bucket of drinking water, we wait because we do not have a choice," he said. In summer, when his family's need for water multiplied, those waiting periods became more frequent. "Even if my parents are thirsty, we sometimes wait for hours before we can drink." Three years earlier, Shiv's mother, Parmi Devi, had been assaulted after an argument with a member of a dominant caste at a village handpump. She was beaten and thrown to the ground three times, she alleged. She filed a police complaint. No arrests have been made.

The Dalit Dignity and Justice Centre, a non-profit organisation in Uttar Pradesh, has documented such disputes repeatedly. In 2025, police registered 113 cases under India's law against caste-based atrocities in the area. A majority of the complaints tracked during the hottest months of May and June involved water. Kuldeep Singh Baudh of the centre told the BBC that to understand the heat's impact, "you have to see it from the perspective of the communities that are the most excluded." The District Magistrate's office rejected these accounts entirely, stating that there was "not even one instance" of caste-based discrimination in water access in the region and disputing claims of water shortages altogether.

Dominant-caste residents interviewed acknowledged growing pressure on water supplies but denied discriminating against others. Ram Gopal Singh, in his 50s, pointed to abandoned village wells that had been dry for nearly two decades. Other sources had dried up or become polluted. Unreliable tap connections had pushed more families toward handpumps. Everyone, he said, tried to collect water in the cooler morning hours, leading to arguments over turns and quantities. "But there is no caste-based dispute at these handpumps," he insisted. Dalit residents described a different reality. There was no formal queue. Instead, families timed their visits to avoid confrontations. Mamta usually went very early in the morning or late in the afternoon. "The fear of being targeted stays with me throughout," she said.

Mukul Sharma, a researcher on caste and environmental politics, framed the problem in terms that go beyond simple resource scarcity. Climate change, he said, is "not the origin of these injustices, but a threat multiplier." More water alone will not solve the problem if caste still determines who gets to use it. The federal government's Jal Jeevan Mission aims to provide piped drinking water to every rural household. Traditional water bodies have been revived. Women-led groups called Jal Sahelis work in villages to monitor supplies and promote conservation. Yet these efforts, however necessary, address only part of the crisis. The deeper question is whether systemic change in water governance—change that acknowledges and dismantles the hierarchies embedded in access itself—can happen alongside efforts to increase supply.

That May morning, Mamta waited beside the handpump as other families filled their buckets, her three empty plastic containers at her feet. In cooler months, she made the journey only a few times a day. In summer, it could be eight or ten times, each trip determined partly by who was already at the pump. When her turn came, she filled her buckets and carried them home. Later that day, she would return.