ABSTRACT
Introduction Growing urban water stress is one of the features of India’s water crisis. Reducing per capita supplies and reliability, huge water wastages, growing inequity in access to water and its inefficient pricing across different classes are some of the problems (Mukherjee et al. 2010). Growing deprivation of the urban poor of water for basic survival needs is a remarkable dimension of the entire crisis, found in many cities of India and elsewhere in the developing world (UNDP 2006). This crisis has mainly stemmed from exponential growth in urban water demands, compounded by dwindling local sources of water and the increasing inability of urban water utilities to improve the water supply infrastructure (Tecco 2008). On the demand front, over the past few decades, the urban population in India has been growing at a much faster rate than rural populations, due to rapid urbanization and industrialization. This growth is mainly concentrated in some of the naturally water scarce regions of the country, as evident from a recent research (Mukherjee et al. 2010). The population rise and economic growth increase urban water demands exponentially. First, the population itself increases the per capita water supply needs of municipalities due to the increasing need for sewage disposal.1 Second, economic growth increases the per capita water demand for domestic uses (Amarasinghe et al. 2007) and income elasticity will be higher at lower levels of demand (Rosegrant et al. 1999). Also, urban growth, which comes with heavy industrialization, will increase the water supply needs for commercial activities and manufacturing units. Failure on the part of water utilities to realistically project future growth in water demands is characteristic of poor urban governance. As regards the supplies, local water resources in urban areas are fast depleting as they come under heavy stress due to concentrated demands (Mukherjee et al. 2010). Over-exploitation of local aquifers due to excessive draft, compounded by problems of quality deterioration; reduced yields of surface sources such as ponds and tanks due to land use changes in catchments, and encroachment by developers; and water quality also suffers due to indiscriminate disposal of solid
waste and urban domestic and trade effluents. Further, in many cities and towns, the water infrastructure is increasingly becoming inadequate to cope with the urban growth in terms of geography and demography. Lack of adequate finance is another major problem. The traditional civil engineering approach to managing water supplies has focused on increasing the capacity of existing sources, and exploiting new sources of water in the vicinity or elsewhere without much consideration to the sustainability of a resource base, or environment or ecosystem. A lack of focus on fiscal and market instruments to manage the demand for water including pollution control is also visible. As a result, attempts to increase the supplies results in an increasing demand for water with no positive impact on scarcity mitigation, with a widening gap between the rich and the poor and growing problems of pollution. This is compounded by the sectoral and segmented approach to managing water for urban areas.2 The overall outcome is that with growing size, urban areas are increasingly dependent on exogenous sources of water from far off regions (Mukherjee et al. 2010) that pose major technological, institutional and financial challenges to urban utilities. Nearly 25 per cent of India’s poor live in urban areas. Though India has made substantial progress in reducing poverty over the past 25 years (Asefa 2005),3 improved water security is crucial to sustain the progress in human development and the current economic growth, thereby reducing poverty (Kumar et al. 2008a). This would require investments in water infrastructure, supported by appropriate policies and institutions. According to the Global Water Partnership, in order to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) related to water, the level of investment in the sector would have to be raised to US$180 billion per year from the current level of US$75 billion. The future would see a greater percentage of our population living in urban areas (Government of India 1999). Hence, a significant chunk of this investment will be for tackling urban water scarcity. However, comprehensive approaches to dealing with urban water problems are lacking.
