“Since it rained two or three times last week, the water situation is good in our village. Before that, the land was so dry that even moong and bajra crops stopped growing. We have some grass for the cattle but the wells are dry. It is a problem to find drinking water as tankers come only once in 20-25 days,” Hanumanth Dattu Gaikwad, Agriculture Officer, Manndeshi, told The Indian Express. In the film, The Search for Water, Gaikwad says that the situation is such that he bathes in his courtyard so that the trees get watered simultaneously. “No rain, no water, even to drink,” says a young man in the film. An elderly man informs the viewers, “We have had a drought situation for two years. “Hunger can be controlled, can thirst be controlled?” asks a woman. The short film, made by Achyutanand Dwivedi and Prabhat Sinha, uses human stories to delve into the heart of the water crisis in Mann in Satara district, a part of Maharashtra where nomadic Dhangar shepherds have roamed for centuries. It is a region where people, now, spend entire days during the summer months waiting for water tankers. “After we wake up, we are faced with this worry,” says a voiceover as the camera pans out on an arid landscape interspersed with houses and a near-hollow well. While the film touches upon the crisis from multiple angles, from migration to poverty to living with smelly water, Sinha tells The Indian Express that “people have realised that they're not going to get water every day”. Dwivedi is an eminent filmmaker, who has won Cannes Film Award, among others. Sinha is a former state-level sportsman and a part of the Mann Deshi Foundation that is working on empowerment, water conservation and sports activities in the rural areas of Mann region. As Sinha is a local, he has witnessed the water crisis up front, from the time he and other children would jump into wells, taking care not to hit their heads on the sides, to when the land became brittle for lack of water. “When I walk or cycle to school, I used to see wolves once a week on the way and hyenas at least once in a month. Now, I have to roam around at night for three months to see a wolf or a hyena,” he says. “There used to be a lot of ponds filled with water when I was growing up. Because those lands have been converted for farming, the ponds are gone. Our river, the Man Ganga, was always known as a drought-prone river. When there was water, I used to swim in the river. That doesn't happen anymore because of sand mining. The water does not stay for three-four months as before. The groundwater level has gone down. The water dries up in one month. This is another difficult part of what we have done, as humans, to the climate,” says Sinha, who studied at Fergusson College in Pune for two years before leaving for the US. The film captures the crisis through vivid visual details, such as of a ground so dry it has broken into pieces or of hens at a puddle in the rocks. The range of people interviewed tell their personal stories with stark simplicity and helplessness. The film is a capsule of a larger global problem. The UN Environment Programme says that at least 50 per cent of the planet's population – 4 billion people – deal with water shortfalls at least one month of the year. By 2025, 1.8 billion people are likely to face what the Food and Agriculture Organization calls “absolute water scarcity.”
