wl-7182-Serving a Pipe Dream - Alternatives to Centralised Piped Water Supply in Two Metro Cities in India

The paper examines the dependency of households on the centralised piped water supply (CPWS) in two metropolitan cities of India—Kolkata and Chennai. The paper underscores the limitations of CPWS in achieving a universal water supply and its perceived dominance as the sole technological choice by decision makers. Despite the access to CPWS, households across the class routinely access water from alternative sources, such as Packaged Drinking Water (PDW) and groundwater. The dependency on these alternatives is comparable to piped water supply. In Chennai, 74% households depend on alternatives, comparable to CPWS (80%), while groundwater dependency is 62% in Kolkata and 92% in Chennai. Considering this scale of dependency, we cannot ignore these alternatives, and for various reasons, it is not feasible for water supply departments to replace these alternatives in the near future. Furthermore, leaving millions of citizens entirely dependent on privately operated and unregulated PDW industry for critical services such as water supply is unwise. Therefore, it is imperative for decision makers to go beyond the model of CPWS and further explore and experiment with the context-specific alternative non-networked strategies of service delivery, by integrating learnings from alternatives that have demonstrated their worthiness in terms of the way they have evolved, stabilised, penetrated spaces served by CPWS, and have been serving a considerably large population in these cities for years.