Water, Women and Rights: Rural Water Supplies, Drip Irrigation, and the (Re)Feminization of Agrarian Labor in India

In this presentation, Dr. Trevor Birkenholtz argues that there is a (re)feminization of domestic and agrarian labor in the rural Global South as a result of inconsistent water development programs. Drawing on a case from northwestern India, he discusses two processes exacerbating agrarian gendered labor burdens. First, development programs aim to enhance water use efficiency in irrigation through new drip irrigation technologies. Yet these have high maintenance requirements, which are seen locally disproportionately as ‘work for women’. Simultaneously, rural water-supply development schemes aim to enhance access to water, in part, by reducing the amount of time women spend collecting water. Yet in doing so, these schemes reinscribe women as responsible for domestic water collection. Through what lens does Development envision the agrarian hydraulic landscape? How does this affect gendered work opportunities and ecological change? In this talk, Dr. Birkenholtz explores these tensions, discusses their outcomes and concludes with some possible ways forward from this imbroglio.

Dr. Trevor Birkenholtz is a cultural and political ecologist, and development geographer. His work attempts to link the political economy of access to and control over environmental resources, and ecological change (political ecology), to issues of technology, knowledge, and social power, more typical of research in science and technology studies (STS). To date, he has advanced these concerns by investigating the transformation of groundwater-based irrigation, and urban and rural water supplies in South Asia. He also serves as Environment and Society Section Editor for the journal Geography Compass.