Nagina Kouser - a twelve-year old girl from village Bariari in Mandi tehsil of border district Poonch had never thought that the torrential rains that flooded the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir in September last year would change her life forever.
After losing her right leg up to knee to the injury caused by the tin sheets, today Nagina and her family are seeking support from various activists and non-profit organizations to help her get an artificial limb that may help her get rid of the crutches but will she ever be able to forget the incident?
Twenty-eight year old Fatima Bi was seven months pregnant and already a mother of four when her husband Mohammed Farid, a labourer was washed away by the devilish waters in Poonch. Forty-year old Parveen Akhtar, who had lost her husband three-months before the floods, was robbed of everything else she had by the flash-floods. Today, she does menial jobs to feed her three children.
And the list of such heartbreaking stories is endless.
All these women come from a region where life had never been easy and with floods destroying whatever little was there in the name of development, it is going to be a tough road ahead. Located two-hundred and fifty kilometers from Jammu, Poonch is a border district surrounded by the Line of Control from three sides.
This district manages to grab the attention of media whenever there is a ceasefire violation but beyond that Poonch remains missing from the larger picture. Even during the floods not much attention was given to Poonch which otherwise was the worst-affected district in Jammu region based on the assessment of flood damages done by the Government with massive devastation of public and private property, besides loss of over two dozen lives.
In a state where women have less freedom and mobility to look for alternative sources of income, it becomes important to analyze the effects of such event through the lens of gender as even before the floods, these women - irrespective of their age, were carrying the onus of water crisis over their heads, literally.
Women from various villages in Poonch especially in Tehsil Mendhar had to walk a distance of two to eight kilometers on a hilly terrain to fetch drinking water to meet the requirement of their household chores and livestock. It had a grave impact on the health of women predominantly on their back-bones and eye-sights. With flood waters damaging the roads and other pathways, the drill is going to hamper women's health even more severely in the coming years.
For sixty-year old Sarwar Jahan of Keerni Village, the day started with feeding her cattle and goat before turning to household chores. She treated her livestock at par with her children but the entire lot was killed leaving only one cow injured during the floods. "We were completely unprepared. My family made every effort to save the animals, but was no match for the floodwaters. We had just two cows. One died and the other is gravely injured. Our one goat also died. Our house, livestock and fields are entirely gone," says her son, Nazam Din Mir, a social activist in the region.
His worries reflect upon the fact that the livestock and agriculture contributes largely to the livelihood of the villagers with women playing great roles. Women in J and K conduct 80-85% of the agricultural operations, either alone or along with men. But with floods destroying 28369 kanals of land in Poonch alone with no estimated figure of loss of livestock available, a large population of women involved in agriculture and livestock rearing have been left bereaved of their contribution to the household. They have been left jobless.
Other than the floods, what is bothering these women is that they do not know the reason behind the loss and are clueless on what to do if such a situation repeats itself. As per Sunita Narain, director-general, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) the disaster happened due to a combination of unprecedented and intense rain, mismanagement, unplanned urbanization and a lack of preparedness. But all these terms have no meaning in the lives of these women who have never been taught or made aware of phenomenon like climate change, adaptation, mitigation to the changing environment, disaster management et al.
The flash-floods of 2014 has again brought to fore the point that women in rural areas should be provided with greater knowledge on climate change and its consequences. Policies should be designed keeping in mind their role in the society. It is imperative to involve them at the planning level than to sympathize with them after every such situation.
The only true sympathizers with the rural women of Poonch are the hill women of Rudraprayag district who had undergone the similar stress during the flash-floods of 2013 in Uttarakhand. Forgetting their own miseries they are worried about their counterparts in Jammu Kashmir and are praying for their recovery. The Charkha Development Communication Network wishes that our leaders would share similar sensitivity towards the nature and people living closest to it while designing development policies for the nation. (The views expressed in the article are of Chetna Verma.
