It is 4 am in Jungle Mahal village, and the lane outside Ghanshyam Maurya’s house is still dark. The 52-year-old has already left, pushing a wooden handcart with a huge water tank on it.

Inside, his wife, Shashi Lata, is lighting the stove. By the time the roti goes on the griddle, her husband will have crossed several kilometres, stopping at every junction where he has placed earthen pots for labourers, travellers, patients, and passers-by.

At each stop, he lifts the lid, empties the previous day’s water, and pours fresh drinking water in. At some places, he leaves two or three pots. At others, he places a thin cotton towel, a pair of slippers, and sometimes biscuits or sweets beside them.

The towel is for the heat. The slippers are for those he has seen walking barefoot. The biscuits and sweets are a small kindness for people who begin their day with hard labour and little else.

Across the tribal belt around Ahraura in Uttar Pradesh’s Mirzapur, Ghanshyam and Shashi Lata are loved as the couple who carry clean water. Every summer, for four months, they place earthen pots at busy junctions, outside the market, near the bus stop, at the government hospital, and in areas where labourers gather before work.

“This is a hilly region, and contaminated water comes here. The water that comes through the pipes is yellow in colour,” Ghanshyam says.

This summer, he has 150 pots out on his route. He has the handcart. He has the towels. He has the will to keep going. What he needs now is a small battery-run rickshaw (a toto) that once helped him carry this water much further.

For most of the past six years, he rented a toto. This year, he cannot afford it. The route that once stretched towards tribal hamlets, labour camps, and faraway junctions now ends where his handcart can no longer go.

Beyond that point, people still wait. The water does not reach them.

Donate today to help Ghanshyam buy a battery-run rickshaw and take clean drinking water beyond the last stop his handcart can reach.

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‘I lost my mother because of dirty water’

In 2015, Ghanshyam’s mother fell ill with anaemia, which was caused by the contaminated yellow water that came through the pipes in Jungle Mahal — the same water many families in his village had been drinking for years. 

“We tried a lot and spent money on my mother’s treatment, but she could not survive,” he says. “Many people in our home and village were falling ill because of this contaminated water.”

Ghanshyam spent Rs 1.5 lakh on her treatment. For one and a half to two months, she seemed to recover. Then, in 2017, she passed away.

That was when he decided that whatever work he did from then on would be for the good of others.

But, he could not afford a borewell for the village. He could not afford a filtration........

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