“Everyone speaks of moving beyond caste divisions, but here we have no such reality--no facilities, no water, we are dying like this for water everyday.”
Kurkuri village resident Rani Kumari’s words are a haunting reminder that even today water is not a universal basic human right. The burden of crumbling infrastructure, poor governance & societal beliefs continue to be borne by marginalized communities like the Dalits of Kurkuri Mushari.
Access to water in rural areas in India comes primarily from handpumps, open wells & ponds that pose a significant public health risk due to contamination.
In 2016, the Government of Bihar launched the ‘Har Ghar Nal Jal Yojana’ that promised to bring clean drinking water directly to the doorstep of every rural household. Water pipelines were to be laid in over 40,000 villages with drinking water supplied for two hours each in the morning, afternoon and evening.
When the scheme came to Kurkuri Mushari in 2020, a village 8KM from the capital Patna,the residents were overjoyed to see government contracted workers installing pipelines and individual taps in every home. Their joy was short-lived.
After two-three days, water stopped flowing from the taps.
Five years on, in an ironic turn of events, the residents of Kurkuri were forced to source water from a government installed handpump - the very infrastructure that the scheme was intended to replace!
But given the pressure on the resource used by 1000+ people at the height of a grueling summer, even the handpump gave way.
Villagers had no choice but to go begging door-to-door for water to drink. Water for bathing, cleaning and cooking was a luxury.
When Madhur Kumar reached Kurkuri on one such sweltering summer day in May 2025, he was told, “many like you have come & gone but there has been no solution to our struggle”.
But Madhur had been one of them. Corruption had taken away the roof over his head as a child. He knew where the shoe pinched.
The villagers were frustrated with tall talks of their representatives and impatient after years of being ignored and denied even the chance to speak to them, given their ‘lower caste’ status. Previous attempts at approaching senior officials through formal channels had led nowhere.
Madhur understood a community’s thirst had long been stuck in bureaucratic loops, it needed to be quenched.
Rather than following the same top-down bureaucratic path, on his very first day, Madhur organized a community meeting and dialled the area-in-charge Junior Engineer from the Public Health Engineering Department (PHED) on his mobile in front of the villagers.
The junior engineer after assessing the situation assured that he could get the handpump fixed as an immediate solution to the water crisis. Madhur made a video of the water crisis in Kurkuri and shared it actively on social media & with relevant officials & community workers.
The very next day a mechanic from PHED was sent to repair the broken handpump and water supply was restored, giving the residents of Kurkuri some respite.
The basic human right to reliable and clean tap water still remains elusive in Kurkuri. The pipelines and taps laid under the ‘Har Ghar Nal Jal Yojana’ are just relics, silent witnesses to a community still at the risk of a drought.
But for now the sound of water gurgling from a handpump keeps Kurkuri alive, along with the hope that water will flow from their taps one day.
Until then “we are grateful for the Messiah who could bring back water to us”, says Rani Kumari.
Money collected for this story will help Madhur Kumar continue the campaign for pipes to be repaired bearing reliable, clean tap water to every house in Kurkuri.
Meet the reporter
The turning point in Madhur Kumar’s life came when corruption denied him a home.
In 2010, Madhur’s name was illicitly removed from the house legally allotted to him under a government housing scheme after a bribe was demanded by the panchayat secretary. The injustice left a lasting impact and sparked his resolve to fight back rather than stay silent.
His journey into public service began soon after, when he joined an NGO working in drought-affected areas and helped labourers access work under MNREGA. Driven by a higher purpose, Madhur went on to contest & win the local elections, serving two terms as Gram Panchayat member.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, an interview with Video Volunteers introduced him to citizen journalism. In 2022, he joined their Buland Bol campaign, learning for the first time how to shoot and edit videos. “When people told me they had seen me on Facebook, my confidence changed completely,” he recalls.
Today, Madhur reports on corruption, access to welfare, and basic services in his community. One of his investigations exposed corruption in the public distribution system, leading to the restoration of ration supplies that villagers had been denied for years.
“I used to fear government officials,” he says. “Now people come to me with their problems.”
From a silenced villager to a trusted voice for change, Madhur Kumar now uses journalism to demand accountability and to ensure the voices of the voiceless are finally heard.