Children climb onto a wooden cart stacked with plastic drums as it rolls forward, pushed and pulled by bodies accustomed to weight. This is not play. The water they carry will decide the day’s cooking, washing, and drinking in their households.
Image: Thomas Malsom
Meghalaya is often described as a land of water. The state receives some of the highest rainfall in the world, and its hills, forests, and aquifers are shaped by monsoon-fed abundance. Yet water scarcity has long been part of everyday life here.
When I began my India Water Portal Fellowship, I set out to look for stories about water, stories about supply systems, governance gaps, and everyday struggles in Shillong. I did not expect that one of the most powerful stories would unfold quietly on steep neighbourhood roads, carried by children on four small wheels.
I had been walking through neighbourhoods where water supply is uncertain, observing how families cope when taps run dry. That is when I began noticing children pushing handmade carts loaded with plastic drums. At first, I saw only the effort — the uphill climb, the careful balancing of containers, the urgency to reach home before supply stopped. But as I returned again and again, I began to see something more.
In these spaces of uncertainty, the burden of water collection often falls on children. This photo story documents the daily journeys of children in Shillong who fetch water using handmade carts built from scrap materials. Their movements trace an informal water network, one powered not by pipes or pumps, but by labour, ingenuity, and necessity. Through landscapes, textures, wheels, and gestures, these images ask why water scarcity persists in a rain-rich city and what it means when childhood becomes infrastructure.
A water cart assembled from discarded wood, cut coal drums, old bearings, and mismatched wheels.
But in neighbourhoods where municipal supply is unreliable, I began to notice something striking. Waste had been turned into infrastructure. Handmade carts were built from leftover wood, metal rods, can lids, rubber from tyre tubes, and improvised wheels. They were moving where pipelines could not. The more time I spent there, the more I understood that these carts were not temporary fixes. They were survival systems.
This cart is made of steel, which is stronger and more durable but also heavier to push along Shillong’s steep roads.
Across Meghalaya, I saw carts that differed in shape and material. Some were wooden and roughly assembled. Others were reinforced with steel, suggesting a slightly different economic position. Yet all of them demanded physical effort. They are made from whatever sturdy material is available. In some cases, the wheels are fashioned from two or three metal lids tightly bound together with rubber. Nothing is designed; everything is improvised.
Scarcity pushes people to innovate. But it also reveals something deeper, that households are left to construct their own parallel systems when formal infrastructure fails them. Water access here is uneven. It depends not only on availability, but on what a family can afford and what a child can physically push uphill and back.
A child lifts containers at a roadside tubewell that flows only for a few hours each morning, usually between 7:30 and 10:30 AM.
Time shapes these journeys as much as distance does. Supply can stop without warning. Children hurry. Buckets are filled quickly, sometimes passed through pipes into waiting containers at home. There is little room for delay.
In these moments, urgency becomes visible. Every drop matters. Every minute counts. Returning home with half-filled containers is not an option.
As I photographed these scenes, I realised that the story was not only about ingenuity. It was also about pressure, about how scarcity compresses time, labour, and childhood into narrow windows between running taps and dry ones.
Not every child has a cart. Without one, the body becomes the only means of transport. Containers are carried by hand, balanced carefully on a stick, lifted repeatedly. The strain shows in posture, bent backs, tightened shoulders, slow and measured steps uphill. In those moments, I see the sharpest edge of inequality. Even improvised tools are out of reach for some. Where infrastructure fails, physical labour fills the gap.
When it is not hauling water, the cart becomes a playground. Laughter replaces labour, if only briefly. Childhood finds space for play even within scarcity, reshaping tools of necessity into moments of joy.
As I spent more time in these neighbourhoods, I noticed something else. The carts are not only instruments of labour. When the containers are emptied and set aside, the same wooden frames take on a different life.
I have watched children climb onto them and race downhill, laughing as the wheels rattle over uneven roads. What carries water in the morning becomes a ride by afternoon. These moments are brief but revealing. The cart does not always carry weight. Sometimes it carries joy.
In many of the areas I visited, it is often boys who push and steer the carts across steep roads, hauling heavy drums over distance. Girls, when they must fetch water, are more likely to walk with smaller containers. These patterns are shaped by terrain, tools, and local practice.
Through these images, I began to understand how children step into the spaces left by fragile infrastructure and uneven governance. They become water carriers and providers long before adulthood asks them to.
Until water systems in Shillong become more equitable and reliable, these carts, buckets, and sticks will continue to shape childhood. Through these journeys on wheels — and sometimes on shoulders — water scarcity becomes visible not as an abstract issue, but as lived reality: measured in distance walked, weight carried, and time given up, one cart, one bucket, one drop at a time.
This story is produced as part of the India Water Portal Regional Story Fellowship 2025.