Waiting for the water train in scorching Rajasthan
40-wagon train has been only source of water for thousands in Jodhpur’s Pali
Afroz misses school every day to spend hours waiting with a handcart full of containers for a special train bringing precious water to people suffering a heatwave in India’s desert state of Rajasthan.
Temperatures often exceed 45 degrees Celsius here, but this year the heat came early in what many experts say is more proof of climate change making life unbearable for India’s 1.4 billion people.
“It’s always been very hot here and we have always struggled for water,” Afroz, 13, told AFP as he waited in Pali district for the second time that day for the special train.
For more than three weeks now, the 40-wagon train — carrying some 2 million litres — has been the only source of water for thousands of people in the district.
Children skip school
Every day, dozens of people — mostly women and children — jostle with blue plastic jerry cans and metal pots to fill from hoses gushing water out of the army-green train into an underground tank.
The wagons — filled in Jodhpur, around 65km away — are first emptied into cement storage tanks, from which the water is sent to a treatment plant for filtering and distribution.
That their children skip school at times to ensure there is water in the house is what hits the families the most.
“I can’t ask the breadwinner of the family to help me. Otherwise, we’ll be struggling for both food and water,” Afroz’s mother Noor Jahan said as she filled up an aluminium pot. “It is affecting my child’s education, but what do I do? I cannot carry all these containers on my own,” she told AFP.
Intense heatwaves
Hundreds of millions of people in South Asia have been sweltering in an early summer heatwave in recent weeks, with India seeing its warmest March on record.
In India, “more intense heatwaves of longer durations and occurring at a higher frequency are projected”, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in a recent report.