The local spring has long sustained residents of water-short Gunung Batur, but their lifeline is at risk during this deep dry spell.
The sound of rubber sandals crunching on dry bamboo leaves is the only noise in the fading light of Sumur Bendung, a natural spring that is a lifeline for the residents of this mountainous community, located at the top of a hill at the westernmost tip of Indonesia’s Java island.
With an empty 15-litre plastic jug on her back, Maia Ruda walks down a steep, tricky path that cuts through mossy stone and damp earth and leads to a narrow riverbed in Gunung Batur, a village at the foot of Mount Batur, Cilegon city in Banten province.
As the sun sets, Ruda reaches the area and sees that six or so other women are already waiting for their turn to fill their plastic jugs. Talking in Javanese, they gather around the Sumur Bendung to take turns collecting the clear water seeping out through its rock crevices. They use hollow bamboo stalks and large ‘hantap’ (Sterculia oblongata) leaves to guide the water into their containers. Filling a single jug takes 30 minutes.
Sumur Bendung’s water has long been a resource for Maia and her neighbours in Gunung Batur, a community that does not have wells given its rugged and elevated terrain, lies beyond the reach of the state’s piped water system and experiences chronic droughts. Tanker trucks occasionally drive up with limited water supplies.
The local women rely on the spring even more in the dry season, which usually runs from April to October. But this year has been different since most of Indonesia is suffering from severe drought, exacerbated by a very strong El Niño event that is expected to peak toward December.
The women villagers have been timing their water collection trips under a community rationing system, set up by the local neighbourhood chief at the Al-Ma’ruf prayer house in March.
“We’ve been living like this for the past four months,” Maia says, resting briefly while her container fills. “We have to walk a kilometre from our village down a steep, slippery path to reach this riverbed source.” Even in early August, she recalls, the water has been trickling down “slower and slower”.
The women reuse mineral water containers because they are light when empty and do not shatter on |sharp rocks. Each full jug, which weighs 15 kilogrammes, goes into a cloth sling around their shoulders.
By nightfall, Maia would have carried eight jugs back up the cliff, with water supply enough to last almost a week for her family of four – her husband and their two children.
Each week, the families of Maia and her neighbours each get two turns to fetch water, once in the morning and another at night. This is part of what the locals in this community of some 1,000 people call their ‘sif’ system, ‘sif’ being a loanword from the English ‘shift’.
The local chief arranged residents into groups of 15 households that take turns heading down to Sumur Bendung within two 12-hour ‘sif’ (one being from dawn to dusk and the other from dusk to dawn) in a routine that ensures everyone gets a fair chance to collect water without causing chaos at the spring.
The locals head for the spring because the two gallons of water that the local government provides each week, under its emergency relief programme during the drought, is far from enough to meet their daily needs.
The women have also reported collecting less and less water at the spring as the drought deepens. They could collect about 20 jugs of water in March but can barely manage eight per turn these days, as the water has beendripping much more slowly down the rocks.
“We don’t know what we’ll do if the water stops dripping altogether,” says Ali Asmudin, another resident.
Fetching water has also become much more time-consuming and tedious task for Gunung Batur’s women who, like elsewhere in rural Indonesia, carry the disproportionate burden of collecting water across long distances. For those in this village, this responsibility has become a test of endurance, while the men are away at work.
“Nothing changes here. The story is always the same when the dry season arrives,” says Ali Asmudin, another resident.
Indeed, the community becomes totally reliant on the spring in the dry season, but this year’s longer and very dry spell feels drastically different. While locals are used to seasonal droughts, they are worried by the severity and speed of the depletion of their spring water.
In a typical dry season, rural communities can still rely on deep wells or occasional brief rainfall to replenish surface water. But heat has been baking the earth in this prolonged drought, made worse by an El Niño event that has itself been exacerbated by warming global temperatures.
In mid-September, Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysical Agency (known by its acronym MBKG) reported that 80.7% of the country’s territory (564 seasonal zones) is under drought. Many areas (a total of 1,637 locations across the country) have had not a single drop of rain in more than 60 straight days, it said.
Delayed Wet Season
The government warns that the water shortages are expected to continue, given below-normal rainfall expected in the coming months. These conditions do not only dry out raw water supplies like those of Gunung Batur, but cripple agricultural yields and compromise hydropower generation.
They have also drastically increased the risk of forest and land fires. Indonesia has been seeing huge fires, many of them raging across peatlands in Kalimantan in intense El Niño conditions. These have created a haze crisis that has sent polluted air across other countries in Southeast Asia in recent weeks, making it the worst episode since 2015.
Expected to become the strongest on record, this El Niño event is seen to continue till February 2027, says the World Meteorological Organization. (As of 19 September 2026, the Oceanic Nino Index was showing sea surface temperature anomalies in the equatorial Pacific waters reaching +3.07 degrees Celsius, classifying it as a “very strong” event.)
Meantime, Indonesia’s government continues to ask the public to conserve water, use it wisely and prepare emergency reserves. Local authorities have promised, by the end of this year, to construct a permanent water pipeline system that reaches Gunung Batur, despite its rugged terrain.
But it is today that worries its villagers. Their biggest fear is that the rock crevices around Mount Batur, which sustains them with clean water, will completely dry up before November.
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Garry Lotulung is a freelance photojournalist and documentary photographer based in Jakarta, Indonesia.
This article was first published on 26 September 2026 by Reporting ASEAN as part of its Sustainability Series supported by Heinrich Böll Stiftung Southeast Asia.
Disclaimer: This published work was prepared with the support of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. The views and analysis contained in the work are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the foundation. The author is responsible for any liability claims against copyright breaches of graphics, photograph, images, audio, and text used.
