ABSTRACT
This chapter considers two cases of urban water management. The first is Chennai, the capital of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, one of the country’s four big metropolises. It has a population of over 5.6 million and has been infamous for its acute scarcity of drinking water and huge unsustainable systems, which relied on tankers and pipelines to transport drinking water long distances. The city exploited the groundwater under it, and its neighbours’ groundwater too. The other case is Musiri Town Panchayat, which had no town sanitation system, just a plethora of informal, inadequate and unhealthy ways of dispensing with human waste. Besides lacking funds, the town faced environmental difficulties in integrating conventional sanitation systems.
