Water security and sustainability in urban India

Abstract

The rapid growth of population combined with rising levels of consumption and pollution has increased water insecurity in urban India. The depleting water sources on the one hand, higher financial and technological costs to refine and transport water from far off sources on the other, leave limited possibilities to augment the water supply in the near future. Climate change may further adversely impact the available sources of fresh water supply. Intra-urban and inter-class water supplies are also issues in Indian towns and cities. A large section of population in urban India collects water from public and private sources located far away from their residence and bears direct and indirect enormous opportunity cost. The present paper discusses these aspects of water security and sustainability in urban India and highlights monitory and social costs of collection of water located away from premises.

Urban Water Resilience in Landscape of Digitally Connected Built Environment: An Assessment Matrix for Cities of Developing Nations

“…Urban resilience refers to the ability of an urban system and all its constituent socio-ecological and socio-technical networks across temporal and spatial scales to maintain or rapidly return to desired functions in the face of a disturbance, to adapt, to change, and to transform systems that limit current or future adaptive capacity quickly (11), or as Brooks et.al (2005) defines, "the capacity of linked social-ecological systems to absorb recurrent disturbances so as to retain essential structures, processes and feedbacks and the degree to which the system can build capacity for learning and adaptation" (12). The latter also refers more explicitly to a multi-scalar system with potential for learning and adaptation/ transformation when ecological, political, social, or economic conditions make the existing system in question untenable (13) (14).…”

An Integrated Quantitative Assessment of Urban Water Security of a Megacity in the Global South

“…UWS issues are particularly pertinent and show insufficient conditions in megacities in the developing world due to rapid and unplanned demographic and economic growth. India is one of the emerging economies where UWS issues are non-satisfying (Shaban and Sattar, 2011;Shaban et al, 2020;Chatterjee and Roy, 2021). In urban India, the rapid population growth combined with increasing levels of consumption and pollution has increased water insecurities (Shaban and Sattar, 2011;Mukherjee et al, 2018).…”

“…India is one of the emerging economies where UWS issues are non-satisfying (Shaban and Sattar, 2011;Shaban et al, 2020;Chatterjee and Roy, 2021). In urban India, the rapid population growth combined with increasing levels of consumption and pollution has increased water insecurities (Shaban and Sattar, 2011;Mukherjee et al, 2018). UWS here relates to both the physicalenvironmental and societal barriers to access, availability, and quality of water for drinking, food production, hygiene, and sanitation (Obani and Gupta, 2016).…”