A governance test we can no longer avoid

The Asian Development Bank’s Water and Sanitation in Indian Cities framework arrives at a critical moment for India’s urban future. Rapid urbanisation, climate stress, and widening inequality are converging to expose a hard truth: India’s water and sanitation challenge is no longer primarily about building infrastructure. It is about how cities are planned, governed, and held accountable.

Over the past decade, national programmes have expanded coverage of water supply and sanitation across urban India. Yet, in many cities, water still flows for only a few hours a day, non-revenue water remains stubbornly high, sewerage coverage lags far behind demand, and wastewater treatment capacity is grossly underutilised or poorly operated. These are not isolated technical failures; they are systemic governance gaps.

Urban water systems continue to be planned in silos. Water supply, sewerage, stormwater drainage, and solid waste management are treated as separate engineering verticals, often implemented by different agencies with little coordination. The consequences are visible across Indian cities: waterlogged streets alongside parched neighbourhoods, drains carrying untreated sewage, and expensive treatment plants disconnected from source sustainability or reuse planning. The ADB framework correctly argues for an end-to-end approach — from source protection to wastewater reuse — embedded within city master plans rather than appended as standalone projects.

Equally important is the gap between access on paper and service quality on the ground. Aggregate coverage figures mask deep inequities. Intermittent water supply disproportionately affects low-income and informal settlements, forcing households to rely on tankers or unsafe storage while paying far more per litre than wealthier neighbourhoods. Sanitation infrastructure, where it exists, often fails women, children, and the elderly due to poor design and maintenance. Urban planning must therefore move beyond counting connections to measuring reliability, pressure equity, water quality, and dignity of access at the neighbourhood level.

Financial fragility remains the quiet crisis undermining urban water utilities. High non-revenue water, low metering, politically constrained tariffs, and weak billing systems leave utilities dependent on grants rather than service performance. When utilities cannot recover even basic operating costs, maintenance is deferred, assets degrade, and new investments deliver diminishing returns. Treating financial sustainability as a political inconvenience rather than a planning imperative has proven costly. Utility reform, professional management, data systems, and realistic tariff structures must be integral to city planning, not optional add-ons.

The stakes are rising. Climate change is intensifying water stress through erratic rainfall, flooding, and groundwater depletion. Migration and densification are increasing demand in cities already struggling to cope. Under these conditions, incremental fixes will not suffice. Cities that succeed will be those that shift from project delivery to institutional capacity, from short-term problem-solving to resilience-oriented governance.

The ADB framework should therefore be read as a blueprint for action, not another report for the shelf. Its insights must inform city master plans, guide investment priorities under programmes like AMRUT 2.0, and shape how urban local bodies structure and empower their utilities. Most importantly, it calls for a redefinition of urban water and sanitation as core public services — essential to health, productivity, and human dignity.

For policymakers and urban planners, the question is no longer what infrastructure to build. It is how to govern urban water systems in a way that is equitable, financially viable, and resilient to the stresses of a rapidly changing urban India. On that question, the verdict of the coming decade will be unmistakable.

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