From contaminated urban pipelines to abandoned reform agendas, the Indore deaths expose how bureaucratic inertia and unequal access have turned water — the most basic public good — into a health hazard
The Indore tragedy reminded me of Albert Camus’ The Plague, which shows that catastrophes happen primarily because of the failure of everyday systems that are presumed to protect life. In the novel, set in 194X, the outbreak of the bubonic plague is a result of bureaucratic complacency, delayed action and the quotidian operations of a city’s institutions, until it is too late.
Indore’s deaths were preceded by resident complaints ignored for months, by pipelines that ran close to sewage, and by tendering processes left to languish, not by drought or force majeure. Like Camus’ Oran, the coastal city in Algeria where plague takes root through the very channels of routine existence, Indore’s water killed through the very network entrusted to deliver it. It only reveals that India’s water crisis today is as much about governance failure and system breakdown as it is about climate and scarcity.
It’s a truth unanimously acknowledged that India today stands on the edge of a colossal water crisis that threatens to undermine its economy, health, ecology, and very social fabric. India ranks among the worst-performing countries worldwide on water metrics, placed around 133rd of 180 nations in per-capita water availability and near the bottom (120th of 122) on water quality, which underscores the gravity of its water governance crisis.
The Centre’s Smart Cities Mission, which was launched with much fanfare in 2015 to develop 100 citizen-friendly, sustainable, and inclusive smart cities by improving infrastructure (water, power, transport, housing) and governance using Information & Communication Technology for enhanced quality of life and economic growth, but closed unceremoniously in March 2025, evaluated that “80 percent of India’s surface is polluted which results in India losing US$ 6 billion every year due to water-related diseases.”
The challenges faced by the Indian water sector, it further noted, are “due to increasing water consumption and wastage in urban areas, water-borne diseases, industrial growth, political and regulatory disputes, water cycle imbalances, increasing irrigation and agricultural demand, lack of technology, etc. According to estimates, India’s water sector requires investment worth US$ 13 billion.” Some experts warn that by 2030 India may fail to meet half of its water demand unless fundamental shifts occur in policy, culture, and management.
This crisis is not accidental nor sudden; it is the culmination of decades of ill-thought-out policies, demographic pressures, and the accelerating impacts of climate change. In recent years, there have been numerous books that have rung urgent alarm bells by placing India’s water woes in historical, ecological, and social perspective. Let’s consider, for the sake of convenience, just two of them that seem to be quite timely: Watershed: The Story of India’s Water in the Age of Climate Change by Mridula Ramesh (Hachette India, 2023) and Shades of Blue: Connecting the Drops in India’s Cities by Harini Nagendra and Seema Mundoli (Penguin Random House India, 2023).
Also read: Bengaluru’s water crisis deepens as cases of contaminated drinking water surge
India’s hydrological story was, once upon a time, characterised by ingenuity, adaptation by locals, and diverse systems of water harvesting. Historically, traditional water tanks, stepwells, and community-managed resources were integral to balancing seasonal variability. But over time, colonial policies and post-Independence development models began shifting water from a community resource to a commodity governed by centralised bureaucracy and technocratic paradigms. Ramesh’s exhaustive book reveals that India’s relationship with water has transformed dramatically over 4,000 years, from it being held in and managed locally to systems rife with inequality and depletion.
Simultaneously, urbanisation and demographic growth have intensified water demand in cities, while ecological stresses — from polluted rivers to encroached wetlands — undermine the very systems that once sustained settlements. Shades of Blue presents a mosaic of Indian cities, demonstrating how intimate cultural attachments to water bodies have been overshadowed by planning decisions that treat water as a service rather than a living socio-ecological system. In a way, these books expose a fundamental truth: India’s water crisis is not merely a problem of scarcity, but of governance, history, culture, climate, and inequality.
The erosion of traditional stewardship
India’s hydrological heritage was rich and adaptive. From the Indus Valley civilisation’s extensive urban planning to the tanks and stepwells of the Deccan and Rajasthan, local water systems were designed with an acute awareness of seasonality and variability. These systems acted as community stabilisers, enabling agriculture and habitation even in challenging climates. However, over time, especially during colonial rule, these systems were marginalised in favour of centralised engineering paradigms — large dams and canals — that often ignored local ecological nuances. Ramesh’s historical account shows how the British regime’s emphasis on profitability and central control weakened community-based water management, replacing it with extractive and rigid structures.
Post-Independence India inherited this legacy. The focus on food security post-1950s, especially after the Green Revolution, prioritised high-yield cereal crops like rice and wheat in regions like Punjab and Haryana that are ecologically ill-suited for them, massively increasing irrigation demands. This shift, while critical in achieving food sufficiency in the short term, amplified pressure on groundwater and surface water beyond sustainable limits. At the same time, India’s monsoon-dependent hydrology — wet in some regions, arid in others — makes equitable distribution inherently difficult.
Climate change has worsened this dichotomy, making wet regions wetter and dry regions drier, creating a paradox that parts of India may soon simultaneously face both deadly droughts and catastrophic floods. Ramesh stresses that this variable, age-old pattern of India’s water is being misunderstood or ignored in modern planning, exacerbating vulnerabilities. Thus, it was the historical erosion of adaptive water wisdom, replaced by one-size-fits-all engineering solutions, that laid the groundwork for the modern crisis.
Urbanisation and fracturing of water systems
While rural areas feel the brunt of groundwater depletion and drought risk, Indian cities are ecological pressure cookers made worse by water scarcity, pollution, and inequity. In Shades of Blue, Nagendra and Mundoli explore India’s urban waterscapes — from the Yamuna cutting through Delhi to the Pichola Lake in Udaipur — exposing how urbanisation has often cleaved water from life. Cities have typically treated water as an engineering challenge: build reservoirs, draft expensive long-distance supplies, and treat it as a utility. This technocentric mindset overlooks the living cultural and ecological roles water bodies played — in community rituals, local climate regulation, and biodiversity. The authors show how pollution from untreated sewage and industrial effluents has rendered once-vital rivers and lakes toxic, eroding both ecological health and community trust.
Moreover, water access itself becomes a marker of inequality. Where wealthy enclaves install private borewells and subsidised piped supplies, poorer urban pockets are left with intermittent, unsafe water. This unequal access is not just a logistical failure but reflects deeper socio-political fractures in how water is valued and allocated. Although Shades of Blue is as much about ecological histories as it is about human stories, its essays underscore that urban water scarcity is inseparable from social access and governance failures. The crisis in cities, therefore, is not simply about less water, it is about systems that have fractured water’s social and ecological connections.
Climate change and ecological extremes
Climate change acts as an accelerant in this unfolding crisis. India’s monsoon — the lifeblood of its agriculture and water supply — is becoming more erratic. Wetter years bring floods; hot years intensify droughts. Scientific analyses affirm that extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and intensity, confounding traditional expectations. These changes not only threaten current water availability but also reshape patterns of rainfall, glacial melt, and groundwater recharge.
Ramesh underscores that climate change’s impact on water is not theoretical — parts of India have already begun to run out of water, and the paradox of drought and flooding co-existing in different regions is a reality, not a future scenario. This means that strategies dependent solely on infrastructure — big dams, canal systems, long pipelines — are increasingly ill-equipped for a world where water patterns are unstable and extremes more common.
Further, climate change interacts with human systems: melting Himalayan glaciers affect river base flows; rising temperatures increase evaporation and water demand; and shifting rainfall disrupts sowing seasons for crops and recharge cycles for aquifers. These ecological pressures intensify water stress and amplify socio-economic vulnerabilities, particularly for farmers and marginalised communities. Climate change today is not just reshaping India’s historical hydrology, it’s also compounding challenges of governance.
Governance, inequality, and the politics of water
The water crisis is at its core a political one. Historical patterns of governance, both colonial and post-liberalisation, have tended to centralise water management, often marginalising local voices and community stewardship. Contemporary reforms, while seeking efficiency, have sometimes strengthened state control under the guise of modernisation, throwing into sharp relief inequities in access and management.
India’s constitution and legal frameworks allocate water responsibilities across multiple levels — irrigation, urban supply, agriculture, and interstate rivers — but coordination remains fragmented. Water discourse is often dominated by engineering solutions rather than inclusive governance that recognises water as a public good and a human right.
Also read: Chennai’s drinking water crisis mirrors deeper urban failures across India
Watershed and Shades of Blue highlight that inequality, whether urban/rural, caste, gender, or class, shapes how water is experienced and contested. Collective water bodies that once formed the basis of local social contracts have eroded, leaving behind a commodity logic in which water distribution aligns with economic and political power.
True reform, as these authors imply, requires rebalancing political priorities. It means empowering community institutions, integrating ecological realities into policy, diversifying cropping patterns to reduce stress on water, and ensuring that access to water is treated not as a luxury but a fundamental right.
A crisis of water and will
India’s water crisis is not an isolated environmental problem; it is a mirror to the fault lines in history, governance, culture, and climate. The erasure of traditional adaptive systems, the prioritisation of short-term economic gains, the pressures of urbanisation, and the relentless advance of climate variability have together created a perfect storm that now threatens lives and livelihoods across the subcontinent.
The 2016 Mihir Shah committee report, ‘A 21st Century Institutional Architecture for India’s Water Reforms,’ argued that India’s water crisis was fundamentally a governance failure rather than merely a scarcity problem. It recommended dismantling the fragmented, engineering-dominated system by creating a National Water Commission (NWC) through the merger of the Central Water Commission and Central Ground Water Board; shifting policy away from dam-building toward demand management, basin-level planning, and groundwater regulation; and rebuilding institutions with multidisciplinary expertise (ecology, economics, social sciences).
The report termed water as a shared, finite resource requiring transparent allocation, robust data, local participation, and federal coordination, warning that business-as-usual would intensify agrarian distress, urban shortages, and climate vulnerability.
Since 2016, the government’s response has been partial. The creation of the Ministry of Jal Shakti in 2019 to improve coordination, large-scale missions such as Jal Jeevan Mission, Jal Shakti Abhiyan/Catch the Rain, and continued irrigation-efficiency schemes address access, conservation, and source sustainability. However, the core institutional reforms proposed by the Shah Committee, especially the National Water Commission, full restructuring of Central Water Commission/Central Ground Water Board, basin-level legal regulation, and deep multidisciplinary staffing, remain unimplemented.
The Centre continues to rely on review committees and interim coordination, which only shows bureaucratic resistance, federal sensitivities, and political caution. The result is incremental progress on outcomes, but no transformative overhaul of India’s water governance architecture as envisioned in the 2016 report. To avert catastrophe, India must adopt a holistic water ethic that honours millennia of water wisdom, realigns governance with sustainability, and confronts climate change head-on. Only then can the nation transform its impending water scarcity from a tragedy foretold into an opportunity for ecological balance and social justice.
