Children’s right to water as a contested domain: Gendered reflections from India

Nandita Singh and her colleagues look at children’s water
rights in India. They argue for the exercise of the right to water by
children by analysing the universal normative-legal framework and
its difference to the local socio-culturally defined framework. They
suggest that defining problems and designing actions only within
the normative-legal framework can obscure understanding the
critical realities at the right-holders’ end. They suggest that
interventions at various levels, such as through policy and targeted
programmes, have at best provided an ‘‘enabling environment’’,
but the process of implementation of children’s rights at the
right-holders’ end is to date an incomplete socio-cultural process