"I've kept my books."

This photo essay explores how learning is reshaped when structural inequities make formal education inaccessible. Set in drought-prone rural Maharashtra, the project follows adolescent girls whose schooling has been disrupted as worsening water scarcity forces them into daily household labour.

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As climate change deepens existing inequalities, education is no longer determined by aspiration alone but by access to basic resources such as water. Girls who once attended school now spend hours walking to distant wells, their learning interrupted, postponed, or carried forward only through memory, notebooks kept at home, and unfulfilled ambitions. The project examines how education is reinvented under constraint not through alternative classrooms, but through resilience, adaptation, and resistance. By focusing on girls at the margins of both environmental and social systems, the essay questions whose learning is valued, whose is sacrificed, and what education becomes when survival takes precedence.