India is growing rapidly in its cities. Cities require water and sanitation and while the government estimates that as much as 80 per cent of urban Indians have access to safe drinking water and 64 per cent to sanitation facilities, these numbers hide more than they tell.
Shortages of drinking water cripple cities. The quality of water supplied is increasingly a problem. The fact is that the pollution of rivers and other water systems puts pressure on public water utilities to increase treatment costs.
Groundwater levels are declining precipitously in urban areas as people bore deeper in search of the water that municipalities cannot supply. In all this, the waste generated by cities is not treated and adds to the burden of contamination of water bodies.
Cities today have no option but to source water from further and further away. This then increases the cost of treatment and delivery of water. It also leads to inefficiencies in supply, with distribution losses estimated to be in the order of 30-50 per cent in almost all cities of the country. In other words, there is less water to supply and there is less water for which full costs have to be recovered.
In this scenario, the cost of supply and delivery is high, the state can afford to supply water to some (the rich) and not all. This leads to huge problems of inequity within the city.
But it is important to understand that even if public agencies were to do full cost pricing - charge users the cost of water supply and waste disposal - even the rich would not be able to pay for the costs.
This is because the current capital-intensive technological model adopted by our cities requires huge investment in supply and treatment of water and waste.
The answer will lie in finding cost-effective solutions to supply and disposal. This can only be done if the water utilities are improved, services are paid for and, most importantly, we realise that distribution losses can best be plugged by reducing the length of the pipeline itself.
A city will be much more efficient if it can strategise to locally collect water, supply it locally and take back the waste locally.
The water imperative is that cities must begin to value their rainfall endowment. This means implementing rainwater harvesting in each house and colony. But it also means re-learning about the hundreds of tanks and ponds that built, indeed, nourished the city in the past.
Almost every city in the country had a treasure of tanks, which provided it the important flood cushion and allowed it to recharge its groundwater reserves. But urban planners over the years have allowed these water bodies to be decimated. Cities only see land for building, not land for water.
Today, these water bodies are a shame - encroached, full of sewage, garbage or just filled up and built over. Bangalore, at the beginning of the 1960s, had 262 lakes; now only 10 hold water.
The Ahmedabad collector - on directions from the high court - listed 137 lakes in the city but also said that over 65 had been built over already. In Delhi, 508 water bodies were identified - again on court orders - but are not protected.
But even this will not be enough. The city will have to learn to minimise its water use and work on conservation and reuse. It needs to plan carefully and reduce the water need in homes and factories.
Rich Australia, which also is water-stressed, has passed a bill that mandates household equipment be water-efficient. But in India, flush toilets still use more water than anywhere else in the world.
Indian cities must look at their waste economy and invest in reuse. This will require them to invest in state-of-the-art equipment that completely cleans wastewater up, making it potable again.
It is also a fact that modern technologies for cleaning waste are out of reach of the waste-accumulated societies of the poor south. They are too expensive to instal and even more expensive to run.
It is here the challenge lies: to reinvent the paradigm of waste treatment by reinventing the paradigm of waste generation itself.
