Waiting for water train in hot India

Jodhpur – 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 45ºC 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,” said Afroz, 13, as he waited in Pali district for the second time that day for the special train.

“But I don’t remember filling up containers in April.”

For more than three weeks now, the 40-wagon train – carrying about two million litres – has been the only source of water for thousands of people in the district.

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.

Water has been dispatched by train to Pali before, but according to local railway officials, the shortage this year was already critical in April so they started early.

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.

But for Afroz’s family and many others like them, life is easier if they fill directly from the storage tanks, despite the water being untreated.

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.

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 and Pakistan, “more intense heat waves of longer durations and occurring at a higher frequency are projected”, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said.