Water: A Service Infrastructure Present Water Supply Paradigm Inequalities in Access

Water: A Service Infrastructure

Figure 13. Ahmedabad water supply

Present water supply paradigm

Ahmedabad is now a sprawling metropolis with a population of 5.5 million (2011). With seasonal stream flows, the city’s needs are met by the conjunctive utilization of extracted groundwater resources with the aid of tube wells technologies and the transportation of surface water in a canal from a dam 534 kilometers away. As discussed previously, large scale dams became the ‘modern temples of India’ (Morrison, 2010) but were ecological, social and economic disasters that caused forceful displacement of the poor (Narain and Agrawal, 1999). The Narmada Dam together with its sister dam Sardar Sarovar has inundated 700 km of river valley and according to the three state governments involved, displaced at least 2 million people (Purseglove, 2019).

These two water infrastructures: the ‘inconspicuous and clandestine’ tube well, and the ‘expansive and monumental’ dam-canal that embody the technological and political extremes of British imperialism (Acchiavati, 2017), are the two primary sources of water for the city today. The current paradigm of water supply is underlined by ‘limitless fresh water’ being a public right and its supply being incumbent upon the government (Wong and Brown, 2009). This informs the planning, construction and management of centralized schemes depending on the extraction of large quantities of groundwater or the transport of surface water. The hydro-social contract is underlined by the logical expansion of government services for a tax, with the implicit promise of providing cheap and unlimited water to support urban expansion for a rapidly growing population. It is now well accepted that this approach is unsuited to address the current and future sustainability issues (Wong and Brown 2009) (Butler and Maksimovic, 1999).

“Even if there is water in the city, for some marked by religion, age, gender or class differences, to get it takes significantly more work.”

Nikhil Anand

Figure 14. Muslim women filling their pots from a tanker, 2019

Inequalities in Central Supply

With centralization of supply, water became an ‘object of the government’ and new forms of municipal governance emerged to manage this complex and invisible network. Consequently, water became a tool for political manipulation and held ‘power over citizens’ to mediate the socio-political dimensions of urban life. This power play resulted in further fragmentation and social exclusion within urban societies. Anand, speaking of municipal supply in Mumbai, notes that the public water network has long distributed difference and inequality in the city (Anand, 2017). In his paper, ‘Municipal Disconnect’, he points to Muslim settlers being often rendered as undeserving of hydraulic citizenship, by being steadily disconnected from formally accessing municipal systems. This is perpetrated by the inaction of technocrats towards maintenance, repair and replacement.

Additionally, with the worsening of the water crisis the burden on women gets magnified as they are indisputably responsible for the procurement of water, making them much more vulnerable to climate change (UNDP 2009) (Matzger and Moench, 1994). The women of poorer households walk large distances to collect and carry water pointing to how gender and class are interpellated in the everyday labour of water management. It is in the marginalized Muslim neighbourhoods that vulnerability of poor women can be directly observed. It is at such intersections of overlapping areas that gender, class and religious discriminations get compounded and make the Muslim woman significantly more vulnerable.

Inequalities in Ground water access

Pump technologies were the most ‘ubiquitous and clandestine’ response to India’s increasing demands for a growing population. Tube wells, especially in areas with minimal access to clean surface water provided a “technological fix” and reoriented people’s thinking about the subsurface, and in turn, reshaped settlement patterns. Today, India has become the single largest user of groundwater, consuming more than a quarter of the global total, with an estimated usage of around 230 cubic kilometers per year (Deep Well and Prudence: Towards Pragmatic Action for Addressing Groundwater Overexploitation in India, 2010).

Residents adopted this technology to supply what the government was unable (or unwilling) to provide. The tube well became a device of insulation from the caprices of both the monsoon and government bureaucracy. For decades, enabled by the linkage of groundwater ownership to land rights, owners drilled as many wells as they saw fit. This pattern was accelerated by the minimal government regulation which was a result of a combination of technical, social, behavioural and organizational limitations (Acchiavati, 2017) (Matzger and Moench, 1994). A tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968) of this openly exploitable resource has occurred.

Due to the mining of groundwater, a practice whereby water is extracted faster than an aquifer can recharge, the shallow aquifer has depleted in Gujarat (United Nations Development Program, 1976; Bandara, 1977). As a result, tube wells are now drilled to even greater depths causing a groundwater “anarchy”(Shah, 2009). With mounting pressures on regional resources, the inequalities and the interregional imbalances continue to grow starker and more tragic (Acchiavati, 2017).

To combat these inequalities in access and supply, we need to transition from a water supply city to a water sensitive one; one with adaptive, multi-functional infrastructure that reinforces water sensitive behaviours (Brown et al., 2016). This is a critical challenge to urban communities that face the impact of climate change and population growth, all the while the city oscillates between long period of droughts and floods (Denton and Sengupta, 2019). As noted in volumes of literature on Water Sensitive Cities, a major socio-technical overhaul in management practices is required with an engaged community that constantly innovates and protects equity around access (Wong and Brown, 2009). This framework shapes the next section of the essay, that explores how the physical realm can support the transition to more water resilient systems and ensure that water is given due prominence within the urban design process.