Now it is monsoon-water is everywhere! But Hinmoy Bawn, a woman of the ethnic minority community and mother of three kids, has to walk a long and rough hilly path every day to fetch drinking and household water.
Hinmoy along with her five-member family lives at Betonipara of Bandarban sadar upazila. There is no source of water in her locality.
So she has to endure the hassle of going to a hilly spring, one kilometre away from her neighbourhood, twice a day to fetch water.
“It’s really a hazardous task to walk through a hilly path. But I have to walk half an hour to go to the spring to collect water and need the same time to return home,” Hinmoy, a woman in her 40s, told the news agency.
During a recent visit to Betonipara, a locality of 25 Bawn families, this correspondent found that a number of women of the ethnic minority community were involved in collecting water from a spring located nearly 100 metres down from the hilltop.
In ethnic communities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), it is women’s responsibility to collect water. They collect water for their households from surface sources walking a long distance as groundwater is not available there due to the unique land formation.
Hinmoy said they use spring water for their household chores and drinking. And all the 25 Bawn families have to come to the spring to do so.
“As we have no alternative, we have to use spring water. Collecting water in hills at daytime is a hard task, and it is even harder at night. We have to walk through jungles for water at night amid the fear of snakebite and attacks by other wild animals,” she added.
“We have to suffer a lot in collecting water during dry season. We have to walk even two miles or more through the hilly paths to collect water,” said Estar Bawn, another woman of the Bawn community who regularly fetches water for her family.
She said sometimes they collect water from Bandarban sadar during winter and bring it in vehicles, spending Tk 300 per trip, but the poor families cannot afford it.
Hinmoy said, “We want to store water harvesting rainwater. About Tk 25,000 is required to install a rainwater harvesting system. But we do not have the money to install such a system.”
Abdul Mannan, a programme officer of Arannayk Foundation, also known as the Bangladesh Tropical Forest Conservation Foundation, said climbing up the hills with jars full of water by women and girls is a common scenario in the remote mountainous areas of the CHT.
The Arannayk Foundation is a joint initiative of the government and the USA government, which seeks to contribute to the conservation of biodiversity assets of tropical forests.
The country’s three hilly districts-Bandarban, Rangamati and Khagrachhari-have long been experiencing drinking water crisis, particularly during the dry season. Groundwater cannot be lifted through tube-well within miles in many areas, officials said.
