Female Literacy and Access to Drinking Water in Rural India

Women and girl children spend considerable time to collect water for meeting the domestic needs of the households in rural areas of many developing countries. Thus, scarcity of water can have disproportionate effect on the welfare of women and girl children. In this paper, I use data from villages in India to examine whether access to water affects literacy among women. I find that literacy rates are almost 5 percent higher for women in villages with access to water, whereas there is no difference in the literacy rates of men. I also examine the effect of distance to the source and the type of source of drinking water on literacy rates. Female literacy rates decrease as the distance to the source increases. Sources that require more time to collect water such as manual wells and rivers have a negative and significant effect on women’s literacy rates. These patterns suggest that longer hours spent on collecting water impact literacy rates of women.