The Day A Man Drank Mud, And Nobody Blinked: Jharkhand In Summers

There is a photograph that has been circulating on social media. A man, face pressed into cracked earth, drinking whatever little water has gathered in a hollow. It looks like a still from a disaster film. It isn't. It was taken in Jharkhand, specifically in the Palamu district, one of the most poor and drought-prone pockets of a drought-prone state during a heatwave that most of the country only half-noticed.

Let us be precise about what this image is, legally and factually. It is not a symbol. It is not a metaphor. It is documentation of the failure of the State to meet its minimum obligations under the National Rural Drinking Water Programme, which mandates at least 55 litres of safe water per capita per day to every rural household. The man in the photograph received none of it. What he received was a hole in the ground. In Jharkhand, 51 percent of people surveyed said that not having water was their biggest problem during the summer heatwave. Sixty-six percent knew someone who had fallen sick from the heat. Groundwater levels in the state decline by approximately 0.5 metres every year. And yet, as of January 2025, Jharkhand's tap water coverage stands at only 55.28 percent  against a national average of 81.87 percent, making it one of the worst performers in the country, alongside Rajasthan and West Bengal. Jharkhand also ranks among the lowest performers in the NITI Aayog SDG India Index 2023–24, with a score of 62 on the clean water and sanitation goal.

The right to clean water is not a political demand in India. It is constitutionally settled law. In Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar ,a case that arose from the very mining belt that borders Jharkhand, the Supreme Court held that the right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution includes the right to the enjoyment of pollution-free water for the full enjoyment of life. This was not a cautious observation, it was the Court's direct holding, that any endangerment of water quality gives a citizen the right to approach the Court for remedy. Thirty-three years later, the Supreme Court went further. On March 21, 2024, in M.K. Ranjitsinh & Ors. v. Union of India & Ors.  a three-judge bench led by Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud formally recognised, for the first time, a distinct constitutional right to be free from the adverse effects of climate change rooted in both Article 21 (right to life) and Article 14 (right to equality). The Court specifically noted that this right carries heightened weight for communities who are geographically and economically most vulnerable to climate change communities who are, by no coincidence, the same ones standing in queues at 6 AM for water tankers in Palamu, or drinking from radioactive aquifers in Jadugoda. For the man in the photograph, this jurisprudence is not an abstraction. It is an acknowledgment that what happened to him on that day in Palamu was not an act of God. It was a constitutional violation.

What makes the water crisis in Jharkhand so catastrophic is not merely the absence of water. It is what the heat does to everything that remains. When temperatures rise, already-shrinking rivers diminish further. Shallow wells, already unreliable, go dry. Groundwater already declining by half a metre annually retreats deeper.

In Jadugoda, the East Singhbhum district residents drink groundwater which contains uranium at levels above 60 ppb. This level exceeds the Bureau of Indian Standards safety threshold of 30 ppb. The situation describes a public health emergency which exists beyond standard definitions. The ongoing constitutional violation exists under Subhash Kumar. The slow accumulation of radioactive contamination, one cup of bad water at a time can cause cancers, congenital disorders, and renal failure. People use the water because the heat makes them more desperate to hydrate. In the Capital Ranchi, 10 to 20 percent of outpatient visits to government hospitals are for waterborne illnesses diarrhoea, jaundice, cholera, and typhoid. These diseases exist because India's public health programmes aimed to eradicate them. The courts have formally acknowledged this trajectory. A recent piece published titled “Right to Cool and Its Implications on Indian Workforce: A Statutory Gap” argues that the right to cool for India's informal workforce can be read into Article 21 as a dynamic interpretation of “life and liberty.” Climate experts have proposed urgent measures, paid heat leave, free water ATMs at labour hubs, and legal recognition for the 'right to cool' to protect India's informal workforce during extreme summer months, noting that heatwaves are no longer just weather events but disasters for those without shelter, water, or rest spaces. Jharkhand's summers are precisely that disaster: already unfolding, already documented.

The actual situation that exists in Jharkhand provides evidence which exists beyond what statistical data can demonstrate. Local activists in Palamu report that while 'Har Ghar Jal' pipes have been laid in some villages, they have never seen a drop of water because the 'source' was never connected to the power grid The people of Palamu village and East Singhbhum mining areas experience a seasonal period of anxiety which they associate with the upcoming summer months through their water rationing practices that women begin in March and the increasing water collection distances that children must travel to reach school and the family well which men observe as it shuts down earlier each year. The hand pumps which government programs installed throughout the villages stand as broken promises because they exist in public space yet remain unmaintained. In some hamlets, they have not worked in years; the nearest functional source is a two-kilometre walk across terrain that a(nd sometimes they are dry too,) by May, feels like walking across a pan. Those who live near the mines describe a different problem, the water is there, but it smells wrong, tastes wrong, sits wrong in the stomach and they drink it anyway, because there is nothing else. The tanker, when it comes, comes once a week, if it comes at all. And people say, with the particular exhaustion of those who have filed complaints and attended meetings and waited for years, that the government's response to a water crisis is almost always another meeting about the water crisis.

This is what it has come to in Jharkhand wherein a citizen named Mukul Bhattacharya had to file a Public Interest Litigation before the Jharkhand High Court because the residents of Wards 1 through 6 of Pakur Nagar Parishad had gone without any drinking water supply for over a year. He prayed, not requested, but prayed before a court that the government arrange for water to be supplied to people living within its own jurisdictional boundaries. He further prayed that the court declare what the Supreme Court had already declared in 1991 that non-supply of drinking water constitutes a violation of Article 21. On August 21, 2024, the bench of Acting Chief Justice Sujit Narayan Prasad and Justice Arun Kumar Rai criticised the State government for its failure, summoned the secretary, directed it to make immediate alternative water supply arrangements for Pakur, and warned that the Secretary of the Department might be summoned if orders were not complied with. The court, in effect, had to threaten to haul in a senior IAS officer before the State showed any willingness to ensure that people could drink water. This is the level at which constitutional rights are being administered in Jharkhand.

What was the State's position in its counter-affidavit? That there were “technical delays.” That contractors were unavailable. The administration that could not provide drinking water to six municipal wards for twelve months had somehow managed to formulate a multi-thousand-crore infrastructure budget.

The Jharkhand government's allocation for irrigation and water infrastructure stands at ₹3,054 crore. The Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM), the flagship national programme meant to provide a functional household tap connection to every rural home, has received substantial central funds. Yet Jharkhand not only remains at 55 percent coverage, it is one of the states that, according to budget tracking data, did not report utilisation of its full GoI allocation under JJM in the most recent fiscal cycle.

The Comptroller and Auditor General of India's Compliance Audit Report No. 2 of 2024 for Jharkhand covering the period up to 2021-22 and including subsequent instances flagged that ₹60.95 crore meant for welfare and infrastructure projects was retained in Personal Ledger Accounts (PLAs) for periods ranging up to seven years, instead of being returned to the departments that required it or deployed for intended purposes. The money earmarked to build pipes sat, untouched, in government ledgers while Pakur waited for water. The State Finances Audit Report No. 2 of 2025, covering 2023-24, further notes that ₹8,089.63 crore was lying unspent in the bank accounts of State Nodal Agencies under various Centrally Sponsored Schemes. The pattern shows a consistent and chronic condition because funds release, funds storage, and funds remaining unspent all persistently occur together with rights violations. The issue here does not involve resource limitations. The situation requires governance solutions because this issue specifically affects constitutional matters through the failure to use welfare funds intended for drinking water and sanitation purposes which the state courts have determined to be a fundamental right.

The industrial activities required for strip-mining operations need to be examined because they constitute the foundation for understanding Jharkhand's water crisis. The state is the country's largest producer of coking coal and its only producer of uranium. The region contains deposits of iron ore and bauxite and copper and limestone. The mining activities of these minerals have caused decades-long aquifer depletion and river diversion and groundwater contamination which affects millions of people who rely on these water sources. The existing legal system establishes accountability through its current laws. The Supreme Court established the Polluter Pays Principle and the Precautionary Principle as Indian domestic environmental legal standards through its decision in M.C. Mehta v. Union of India (1996) which declared that industries must pay for their environmental damage. This principle has direct application to mining companies operating in Jharkhand, whose activities have contributed to both the depletion and the contamination of the water table in districts like East Singhbhum, Dhanbad, and Ramgarh.

There is also the matter of the District Mineral Foundation (DMF), a statutory trust created under Section 9B of the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Amendment Act, 2015. Every mining company operating in a district is legally required to contribute a percentage of its royalties to the DMF of that district, which is mandated to spend those funds on, among other things, drinking water supply and pollution control in mining-affected areas. The PMKKKY guidelines require at least 60 percent of DMF funds to go toward “high priority” areas of which drinking water is the first listed. As of November 2024, over ₹1,02,083 crore has been collected nationally in DMF trusts, of which only ₹54,892 crore has actually been spent.

The question that Jharkhand's mining-affected communities are entitled to ask and that their lawyers should be asking in courts is this, where is the DMF money collected in Dhanbad, in East Singhbhum, in Ramgarh going, and why are the people in Jadugoda still drinking uranium-contaminated water?

The temperature in Jharkhand is projected to rise by 2 to 2.5 degrees Celsius by the 2050s. This is not a number. It is a sentence imposed on the people least responsible for global emissions, least equipped to adapt, and most dependent on the groundwater and rivers that are already disappearing. People can take multiple actions. People can collect rainwater through the practice of rainwater harvesting. The process of groundwater recharge needs to occur before the start of summer. The community water system operates on solar energy. The system enables the community to control their water resources, which they manage through Gram Sabha, according to the legal framework established by the PESA Act and the Forest Rights Act in scheduled areas. The concepts present themselves as basic and established methods which require minimal funding. The solution needs two elements which have not been present: first, administrative determination and second, financial responsibility. The August 2024 Jharkhand High Court order in the Pakur case demonstrates the distance we have to reach actual accountability. The Supreme Court's M.K. Ranjitsinh judgment recognised a constitutional right against climate harm. The Subhash Kumar judgment established the right to pollution-free water in 1991. The CAG has flagged crores sitting idle in PLAs. The DMF framework mandates spending on drinking water in mining districts. The Jal Jeevan Mission has allocated funds. The law is not absent. The money is not absent. What is absent is the state's willingness to move either.

Photographs can do something that numbers cannot. They make the abstract visible. The man in the Palamu photograph is not a data point. He is someone's father, someone's son. He is a person who was thirsty not because water does not exist in India, but because the system that is legally and constitutionally obligated to deliver it to him failed, year after year, crore after crore, court order after court order.

The problem in Jharkhand is not a natural disaster. Droughts happen. What is happening in Jharkhand is something more culpable, a state that holds mineral wealth beyond most countries' imagination, that receives central funds for drinking water, that has DMF contributions from mining companies, that has court orders directing it to act and still has people pressing their faces into cracked earth to find something to drink. That is not geography. That is governance. And governance, unlike geography, can be changed, and under the Constitution of India, it can be compelled. The courts have spoken. The audit reports have spoken. The photograph has spoken. What we are waiting for is for someone in the administration to blink.