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Water Pressures
In India, water is a matter of life and death. Poor women from the slums of Mumbai have only three hours a day to draw water. That water is used for cooking, drinking, bathing their children, and dyeing cotton for their artisan handwork. Multinational companies with plants in Mumbai use water for bottling, agricultural irrigation, production and sanitation. Unclean, scarce water affects slum dwellers and corporate executives, Hindus and Muslims, men and women. The pressures of illness and death caused by unclean water concern everyone.
Yet, this water crisis is not caused by scarcity, but by mismanagement, according to the World Water Council. What can be done? In Chicago, we are building a unique partnership that will help women artisans and corporate executives in India work together to manage common water resources for mutual benefit. artistic circles, MarketPlace:Handwork of India, and CMI Concord Group (a spinoff of the Harvard Negotiation Project) are combining their expertise in television production, organizing women artisans, and mediating difficult conversations.
In the Mumbai area, MarketPlace has fourteen collectives of impoverished women artisans that are already involved in a year-long initiative about water. Charles Barker of CMI Concord Group will take his experiences from facilitating difficult dialogues among U.S. businesses, conflicting factions in the Middle East and tailor water conversations to the women artisans and corporate executives in India. artistic circles will videotape this innovative and ground-breaking process and create the hour-long Water Pressures documentary and accompanying discussion guide.
artistic circles has community partners in Mumbai and Jodhpur, university partners at Southern Illinois University and Grinnell College, and a commitment to distribute the documentary to public TV stations nationwide by National Educational Telecommunications Association (NETA).
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