The Supreme Court ordered that across states, all schools must be provided with toilets and drinking water facilities as part of students’ Right to Education. Arghyam considers sustainable access to safe drinking water an important issue and has promoted it across Karnataka.

This has been done through several methods:

1. Tackled specific issues of water quantity and quality in schools.
2. Worked alongside a government scheme (Suvarna Jala) to demonstrate successful methods of participatory, safe and adequate water and sanitation provision in schools.
3. Supported independent requests from schools for funding rainwater harvesting structures to assist them in providing their students with potable water. To help combat scarcity of safe drinking water a number of measures were undertaken across these five schools. Worked with another funding agency that works on education to build safe water and sanitation into the schools they work in.
4. In all these initiatives, rainwater harvesting systems were created, an underground storage tank was constructed and children were given hygiene education.  Where required, water quality issues were addressed by providing water filters.

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Dhanya’s newsletter, Jala Siri, has been in circulation since 2005. Arghyam supported its production in 2007-08. Arghyam has continued to support 12 issues annually from April 2009 till date. The key objectives of the newsletter were to create awareness on water conservation and management, document & disseminate traditional methods of water management and to build a database of individuals and institutions, who have successfully adopted water management methods in Karnataka. With funding from Arghyam the organisation also brought out a Jala Siri Calendar for the year 2010, 2011 and 2012 that reached various stakeholders.

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