Anita Tripura wakes up at 3.30 a.m., pulls out her teesing –  – a large bamboo basket with aluminium pots stacked up inside it – and marches downhill in darkness. The teesing is attached to a long cloth-band that hangs from her forehead. A flickering kerosene lamp that she holds lights up the path through the jungle.

Anita and her husband farm about 25 kani (roughly 10 acres) and run a roadside tea stall, but most of her waking hours are spent on water. The 40-year-old who lives in Rajadhan Para (village) in Dhalai district hurries downhill hoping to reach the mountain spring before others do. She fills two to three pots of water and makes her way home before her husband and two sons wake up. This early morning trip takes her between two and three hours. In the summer, this could take twice as long. Most days, she needs to make two such trips.

Anita’s daily struggle for water is the story of thousands of women and girls in hill villages of Tripura. A spring is known as gaati in Kokborok, and twikhor in Mizo (twi means water and khor means source). Villagers complain that springs are drying or disappearing due to deforestation and declining rainfall. 

The Union government’s Jal Jeevan Mission shows that 86 percent households have functional tap connections in Tripura. In Dhalai district, that number is 82 percent as of December 11. But when IndiaSpend visited villages, the taps were absent; those that exist never saw water. In North Tripura district, villagers say supply is erratic and they end up depending on a spring for daily needs.

Tripura’s name originated from the concept of land of abundant water – a bitter irony today. In the local language, Twi means water and Para implies land. Indigenous communities refer to their home state as Twipra. 

The state’s dependence on springs is well documented. A January 2023 report by Central Ground Water Board (CGWB), under Ministry of Jal Shakti, highlights that “springs are the main source of water for a large population of communities living in the hilly area of Tripura”. Local practitioners estimate that there are 600-700 springs in Tripura.

Springs are points on the earth's surface through which groundwater naturally emerges and flows. Springs depend on rainfall, which helps recharge aquifers and keeps the water flowing. Natural factors such as seismic activity affect discharge. Anthropogenic pressures, deforestation, rising tourism, and large infrastructure projects are also affecting mountain aquifer systems and leading to a drinking water crisis.

About 32 percent of the state’s population belongs to Scheduled Tribes, while 18 percent belongs to Scheduled Castes. The state has an annual rainfall ranging between 2,338 millimetre (mm) and 2,519 mm in its eight districts. Despite such heavy rainfall, communities suffer from water crises and water-borne diseases; some have even taken to the streets and blocked roads to protest against water scarcity. 

And it is not just Tripura. According to a 2018 NITI Aayog report, there are five million springs across India, of which nearly three million are in the Indian Himalayan Region (IHR). Nearly 50 percent of springs in the IHR region have already dried up or have reduced discharge. An estimated 200 million people depend on spring water across the Himalayas, Western Ghats, Eastern Ghats, Aravallis and other such mountain ranges, implying that more than 15 percent of India’s population depends on spring water.

High and dry

Broadly, villagers in Tripura blame two factors for the disturbance of their springs – deforestation and climate (declining rainfall and rising heat). 

“In the past 20-25 years, monsoon rainfall has reduced in our region,” said Shishukumar Tripura, a 41-year-old resident of Rath Kumar Roaja Para, a tribal village in Manu block of Dhalai district. “Earlier, it used to rain so heavily that we could not even step out of our homes. Now, it rains for a few days and then there is a long dry spell.”

Reduced rainfall is not only affecting mountain springs, he says, but also agricultural activities. Farmers are increasingly shifting from traditional food crops to rubber plantations, which is a water-intensive cash crop. Tripura stands second in natural rubber production in India, after Kerala.

“Earlier we could grow three local varieties of paddy in a year – Baadu........

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