Some 1.5 billion urban dwellers rely on groundwater, globally. Population pressures, rapid urbanisation, increased per-capita use of water, higher ambient temperatures, increasing pressures on river intakes and the relatively modest cost of wells is resulting in an increased urban dependency on groundwater in the developing cities of the world. Given its increasing importance in urban water management, a clear picture about groundwater usage in some 8000 towns and cities in India is still missing from mainstream national discourses on groundwater. The role of groundwater, in burgeoning urban centres, cannot be ignored anymore, if one were to begin addressing both, the groundwater crisis in India as well as the shift in the nature and quantum of water demands in and around these centres, where the major demographic changes will occur in the next few years.
Unless a clear understanding on the state of urban aquifers in India is developed, with the forward linkage of the strategic management of these aquifers, haphazard groundwater use will not only lead to a deepened crisis surrounding groundwater but will also preclude addressing larger questions of urban water governance such as constraints to equitable distribution, lack of safe water and the bigger questions surrounding the sustainability of water supply in Urban India.
Simple Groundwater Diagram
Understanding demand, supply and availability of resources under various scenarios is important in managing India’s water resources. Many large cities in India derive their formal municipal water-supply from surface water (usually piped from sources physically distant from the city or town). At the same time, the rapid expansion of city limits means an increasing dependence on groundwater, either as a supplement to the formal supply or as a stand-alone source.
Take the example of any large city in India – Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune or Ahmedabad. All such cities are ‘geographies’ where the overlay of socio-economic change on the dynamics of water unfolds in myriad ways. Most such cities have ex-situ water sources – a reservoir, a river or a set of dams. Most of these cities also have an ecological and/or legal limit to access its current surface water source. Almost all such cities have a history of local captive sources of water (from lakes and shallow aquifers through open wells) both of which in various states of disrepair.
At the same time, multiple pressures have affected the ex-situ water resources. These pressures include groundwater depletion upstream, reduced inflows to these sources, reallocation to meet other demands etc. Consequently, the pressures on in-situ water sources – almost inevitably and invariably groundwater in various aquifers – have increased. The poor in the cities, whose access is anyway largely constrained, are particularly dependent on groundwater; the peripheries without formal access to municipal water – which house the rich and the poor, the urban and the rural – also almost entirely depend upon groundwater. In fact, groundwater now caters to domestic needs and also drives real estate, commercial and industrial activity in many parts of these growing cities. Most groundwater use is driven by numerous sources tapped through independent and private extraction, usually as a coping mechanism adopted by the citizenry in response to pressures on utilities, sometimes even as a consequence of failure of formal utilities to meet the ever-increasing demand.
Bangalore Water Supply
Therefore, groundwater management in urban India has become an imperative. Developing a knowledge system on urban citizenry and groundwater, with the focus on developing strategies for groundwater conservation, protection and security has become the need of the hour. Specific reference to protecting recharge areas, augmenting recharge, preserving groundwater quality particularly from the risk of anthropogenic contamination, citizen participation for relevant data generation, solution implementation, self regulation complimented by effective governance must form the framework for any emerging initiative on managing city water supply. While doing so, the compounded impacts of a changing climate (evident in the form of changing weather scenarios) and typical urban pressures must be duly considered, both during the data gathering and solution development. It becomes important to capture the groundwater usage patterns across different city zones such as the core, suburban zones, peri-urban zones and the transition zone to the rural landscape on the periphery of the city.
The urban groundwater perspective would need to look into specifics of aquifer-user profiles and the nature of evolving groundwater use in and around growing urban centres. Specific attention is required to questions of protecting recharge areas in and around growing townships (including the question of peri-urban transitions on different aquifer settings), strategies of augmenting recharge and potential impacts on groundwater quality, mainly anthropogenic contamination. The outputs from such studies could include strategies of multi-aquifer groundwater management, including protection and conservation strategies. However, caution needs to be exercised about making generalisations for all towns and cities, without specific reference to the precise nature of the resource (aquifer properties) and the dynamic changes in these properties in space and time due to natural and anthropocentric factors.
How does on go about doing all this? Clearly there is need for greater collaboration within Urban Civil Society – Citizens, Municipalities, NGOs and Academia – to develop water management strategies, keeping in mind aquifer characteristics, groundwater usage zonation and potential impacts from externalities such as a changing climate. Can we begin, for instance, using a participatory knowledge-based system to attempt piloting of such strategies through specific community actions in different parts of cities like Bengaluru, where positive initiatives are emerging through collaborations between some of these players, albeit at local scales? Such initiatives have been able to demonstrate and pilot a participatory approach towards urban integrated groundwater management in some parts, especially in collecting and maintaining data and in developing ‘knowledge-systems’ on groundwater, involving citizen groups and communities. This must eventually be linked to establish water governance mechanisms, at the ward level in municipalities so that mainstreaming of groundwater management within relevant local and regional institutions occurs. Such participatory approaches might quickly lead to the development of regulation protocols (and possibly formal legislation) around groundwater, protocols that evolve and are not necessarily imposed through a top-down system of regulatory governance!