4 Of borewells and bicycles1 The gendered nature of water access in Karnataka, South India and its implications for local vulnerability Chandni Singh Introduction: water scarcity, social-ecological dynamics and gender Access to water, whether for agricultural or domestic purposes, is often identified as the most important factor in agricultural productivity and rural wellbeing (Hanjra and Qureshi 2010; Namara et al. 2010). In India, where 68 per cent of the gross cropped area is under rainfed agriculture (Mishra, Ravindra and Hesse 2013), managing fluctuations in water availability and ensuring water access is particularly critical. The government and rural communities are constantly negotiating with and adapting to these water fluctuations. This chapter draws on data from Kolar, a water-scarce district in Karnataka, South India, to demonstrate how changing water availability since the early 2000s (driven by erratic rainfall, groundwater over-extrac- tion, and erosion of traditional water management structures and institu- tions) has reconfigured household work burdens, and water access and use practices. On a wider scale, privatization of drinking water and decreas- ing reliance on common water resources, such as streams and tanks, have incentivized competitive borewell digging, which has led to unsustainable water use. These shifts in Kolar’s waterscape have implications for house- hold and community capacities to adapt to increasing climate variability and is reconfiguring gendered vulnerability. Since the 1970s, the Government of India has invested in large-scale water management initiatives such as watershed development (Turton and Far- rington 1998; NRAA 2012; Singh 2018) and integrated water management (Saravanan, McDonald and Mollinga 2009). More recently, climate-smart 1 1 Thank you to Nitya Rao for critical feedback throughout the drafting process and to Amir Bazaz and Divya Solomon for shaping my ideas at different stages. This work was carried out under the Adaptation at Scale in Semi-Arid Regions project (ASSAR). ASSAR is one of four research programmes funded under the Collaborative Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia (CARIAA), with financial support from the UK Government’s Department for International Development (DfID) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada. The views expressed in this work are those of the cre- ators and do not necessarily represent those of DfID and IDRC or its Board of Governors. Of borewells and bicycles 59 practices such as solar-powered irrigation (Raitha, Verma and Durga 2014; Bassi 2018) and subsidized drip irrigation (Venot et al. 2014) are being implemented to improve capacity to adapt to climate change as well as secure agrarian livelihoods. Yet these interventions have not responded to the needs of people living with water scarcity, who are constantly negotiat- ing this landscape of scarcity through private, often informal interventions such as digging borewells and hiring private tankers (De 2005; Singh, Basu and Srinivas 2016; Solomon and Rao 2018). Everyday practices of access- ing and using water are highly gendered (Truelove 2011; Lahiri-Dutt 2015; Harris et al. 2017), with women typically being primarily responsible for accessing and using water for domestic purposes and men seen as produc- tive water users, in charge of irrigation and managing irrigation infrastruc- ture such as pipes, borewells, etc. (Upadhyay 2005; Harris et al. 2017). The social-ecological system of which these water access and use prac- tices are a part, has been changing since the early 2000s. Increasing temper- ature extremes and rainfall variability, changing cropping patterns with a shift to water-intensive cash crops, and the degradation of common water resources are changing the landscape of water availability and hence water access across semi-arid India (Reddy 2005; Amarasinghe, Shah and Mccor- nick 2008; Kumar 2011; NRAA 2012; Garg and Hassan 2016; Singh et al. 2019). In a race to secure water resources for drinking and farming, these ecological and climatic changes have atomized water resources through competitive borewell digging (Solomon and Rao 2018), shifted gendered work burdens (Rao et al. 2017; Singh 2019) and led to rapid groundwater over-extraction (Rodell, Velicogna and Famiglietti 2009). Socially, migration and increasing rural–urban flows of people, materials and ideas have loosened community ties and eroded customary access and sharing arrangements, leading to “de-territorialised community spaces and identities” (Robson and Nayak 2010: 275). Increasing encounters with the urban have also shaped aspirations and notions of identity (Singh 2019), eroding the influence of socio-cultural norms and values. This unmooring of the social norms and institutions that encouraged community cohesion has necessitated a renegotiation of the social norms, gendered practices and ideological values attached to place (Rao 2014; Bhagat 2017), with critical implications for how natural resources are valued, accessed, used and shared. Taken together, these shifts in the social-ecological system have altered water availability and norms of water access and use. While several studies capture how and to what extent water availability is changing or projected to change (Kumar, Singh and Sharma 2005; Sharma et al. 2010; Shrestha et al. 2015), few examine their implications for household vulnerability and water security. There is a rich body of work from feminist studies and political ecology on the gendered practices of water access and use (e.g., Meinzen-Dick and Zwarteveen 1998; Upadhyay 2005; Harris et al. 2017). However, gaps remain in understanding its implications for men’s and women’s vulnerability to climatic and non-climatic risks, as well as on local climate change adaptation. This chapter attempts to close this gap by using 60 Chandni Singh data from Kolar to analyze the implications of changing patterns of water availability, access and use, on gendered vulnerability, at different scales: the household, the settlement and the social-ecological system. This attention to scale follows conceptual shifts in climate change research that call for systems approaches to understanding local adaptation (Adger, Arnell and Tompkins 2005; Cash and Moser 2000; Wilbanks 2015), critical for under- standing how wider biophysical shifts and socio-economic dynamics shape gendered individual and household actions. In this study, vulnerability is understood as the tendency to be adversely affected by climatic and non-climatic risks (Adger 2006). Researchers have shown that vulnerability is socially differentiated, embedded in existing cultural and institutional contexts, everyday norms and rules, and cleaved along existing lines of inequality and marginalization (Cutter 2003; Alston 2013). Empirical evidence highlights that vulnerability is also significantly gendered and intersectional (Carr and Thompson 2014; Rao et al. 2017), where being a man or woman intersects with other factors such as age and ethnicity to shape people’s ability to deal with shocks and stressors and attenuate their vulnerability. This chapter draws on two cases within Kolar: the growing informaliza- tion of drinking water access, often carried on bicycles from nearby water sources and towns; and the individualization of irrigation water with an erosion of traditional water management institutions and growing reliance on borewells. Through the imageries of bicycles and borewells, this chapter reflects on what the implications of these shifts in water access and use are for gendered vulnerability of men and women and local adaptation. The rest of the chapter is structured as follows. The next section describes the study site and methodology. The main findings of the study are then dis- cussed, first charting the biophysical and socio-economic changes in Kolar district, then the transitions seen in gendered access and use of irrigation water, and finally the changing nature of drinking water access. The chap- ter ends with a discussion of the implications of changing water access for gendered vulnerability and local adaptive capacity. Context and methodology Context Karnataka is a largely semi-arid state in South India with 54.8 per cent of its rural population engaged in agriculture as a primary source of livelihood (NSSO 2013). Although the gross state domestic product (GSDP) recorded a growth rate of 8.5 per cent in 2017–18, this was mostly driven by the services sector (10.4 per cent growth) in large urban centres such as Banga- lore, with a much lower growth rate of 4.9 per cent in agriculture and allied sectors (Government of Karnataka 2018). Successive Human Development Reports have also highlighted severe socio-economic disparity within Kar- nataka, especially between northern and southern districts (Government of Karnataka 2015, 2018). Of borewells and bicycles 61 Agriculture is the main livelihood in Karnataka, but it is employing fewer people. Between 1993 and 2005, employment in agriculture fell from 65 per cent to 61 per cent and its contribution to the state’s GDP halved from 36 per cent to 18 per cent (Government of Karnataka 2010). While agricul- tural incomes grew by 4.48 per cent between 2002–03 and 2012–13, non- farm incomes in the same period grew by 5.3 per cent, some of the highest shifts in the country (Ranganathan 2014). Agriculture in Karnataka faces multiple problems, from pressures such as land degradation and water scarcity, to issues of low and stagnant crop yields, market