This story originally appeared in the October 2011 edition of the Searchlight South Asia newsletter created by Intellecap for the Rockefeller Foundation.
By Usha Ganesh
South Asia is home to about 20% of the world’s population. It is also home to over 60% of the world’s poor. Rapid urbanization and expanding cities are fast becoming ubiquitous in South Asian countries like India and Bangladesh.
As urban sprawl expands to engulf nearby rural areas, it is becoming increasingly difficult to draw a clear boundary between urban and rural areas. As a result, sizable peri-urban areas dot the landscape. These areas demonstrate urban as well as rural characteristics with traditional occupations giving way to more modern ones, changing lifestyles and social interactions. Most importantly, though, this “urban sprawl” is imposing severe pressure on infrastructure in these areas, particularly in terms of access to water. Peri-urban areas are a veritable no-man’s land, as they are no longer part of the rural governing bodies’ jurisdiction, and are yet to be assimilated into that of beleaguered urban governing bodies. This compounds their vulnerability to water access challenges, as no one is quite clear on who is responsible for ensuring fair water supply to the peri-urban poor.
Water Security in Peri-urban South Asia is a three-year action research project that started in July 2010. It aims to build capacities of the peri-urban poor to cope with water insecurity. The initiative is operational in Bangladesh, India and Nepal, with four research locations – Khulna, Bangladesh, Gurgaon and Hyderabad, India and Kathmandu, Nepal. The project’s partners are the Institute of Water and Flood Management, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka; Nepal Engineering College, Kathmandu; and Management Development Institute and SaciWATERs in Gurgaon and Hyderabad, respectively. The partners collaborate to document how urbanization and climate change affect water availability in select peri-urban locations in these countries. This article presents insights from early reports and scoping studies that form part of this action research project.
Scope and Scale of Urbanization-Induced Water Woes
Unplanned urbanization, although good from a purely economic standpoint for the country as a whole, alters the usage patterns of land and water in these peri-urban areas, and creates vulnerability where there was none earlier. As in most cases, the ability to cope with this vulnerability is skewed, and the peri-urban poor bear the brunt of these challenges. The reports resulting from the scoping studies present deep insights into how unplanned urbanization and climate change can adversely alter the lives of the peri-urban poor.
Cities like Hyderabad and Gurgaon in India developed and expanded to include new districts in response to the needs of a specific industry – in this case, information technology and outsourcing. In the case ofGurgaon, there was a need for a business center near the Indira Gandhi International Airport. Gurgaon’s level of urbanization has risen from 13.8% in 2001 to an estimated 52.5% in 2011. Projections for 2021 are as high as 155%. Hyderabad is seeing similar growth patterns in the HITEC city area and near the new international airport. In Bangladesh, Khulna demonstrates a slightly different pattern. The city is growing due to increasing population density, and is facing rapid climate change challenges.
Peri-urban land development and expansion often happens by covering the land where natural water cycle occurs, such as wetlands, meadows and farms. Hyderabad, for instance, has seen a shrinking of its water sources due to low rainfall, and low groundwater recharge resulting in a depleting water table. A number of manmade tanks have been partially or wholly covered to make place for buildings and offices.
Water that earlier met the needs of peri-urban communities for cooking, drinking, washing and bathing is being diverted for leisure activities such as watering manmade gardens, swimming pools and washing vehicles within high-rise housing complexes. Gurgaon, for instance, boasts eight golf courses spread across approximately 1,200 acres. These golf courses consume close to 120 million liters of groundwater. According to Force, a Delhi-based NGO working for water conservation, this water could satisfy the requirements of 50,000 households. Water scarcity has also resulted in illegal construction of bore wells further depleting the water table: of the 35,000 bore wells dug in the last three decades, only 9,780 are registered.
In Khulna, Bangladesh’s third largest city, an increasing population and the growth of industry has led to pollution of water sources due to release of effluents and solid waste dumps. Increasing sea level and salinity are climate change challenges that exacerbate water access problems. Arsenic contamination, frequent water logging and drainage congestion are additional problems that round up the water access woes of this city. The Khulna City Corporation generates about 240-280 tons of solid waste per day, which is dumped in low lying areas and unplanned landfills. Wastewater is channeled out through various canals and open drains into surrounding rivers and peri-urban water sources.
Insights from the Scoping Studies
Field visits in each of these three scoping studies indicate that peri-urban communities do not just face water scarcity, which could be remedied by solutions to increase supply of water. Instead,the problems have more to do with water security for the peri-urban poor due to urbanization and climate change, and due to the fact that they cannot pay for it.
Urbanization in Gurgaon, Hyderabad and Khulna indicates that routes to water sources are being modified. Water from peri-urban areas are treated and moved to city centers to meet the growing demand for water by those who can pay. The peri-urban poor are unable to pay and, therefore, have unequal access to water. Despite this, many low-income localities in each of these three cities pay for water that is brought to them via tankers. According to a study on water access in Hyderabad in 2003, low-income households accessed water every alternate day or once every 2-3 days. The same study found that nearby IT companies and educational campuses such as the Indian School of Business (ISB) were supplied drinking water through several trips by tankers of the local municipality.
All cities that were included in the scoping studies indicated a marked decline in agricultural activity. In Gurgaon, studies indicate that declining groundwater and crop intensity are likely to intensify with rising temperatures. Further, access to water is often tied to access to land. Most farmers with agricultural land find it more economically rewarding to tap and sell ground water for a price than to pursue agriculture. The next generation is usually employed in nearby factories and offices, and there is little motivation to cling to traditional occupations.
Urbanization also introduces new pollutants to water sources, and the peri-urban poor often make do with polluted water downstream. Researchers on the Khulna scoping study found that the city’s peri-urban population coped by getting used to consuming polluted water.
The involvement of several government departments compounds this problem, because there is no single government department that owns the stewardship of corrective action. Myriad urban government departments have a say in water supply, water access routes, land development and usage, climate change, waste management and environment protection. What’s more, this confusion is multiplied in peri-urban areas, where some departments have taken over their roles in the newly adopted urbanized districts while others are lagging behind.
Action to Improve Water Access
To help peri-urban communities cope with water insecurity, the project teams have each adopted a location where intense community mobilization is taking place with stakeholder dialogue, capacity building of the community and the formation of village water committees for collective action. Dr. Anjal Prakash, Project Director in India says: “We are in the process of identifying the groups that are particularly vulnerable and examining how they adapt to these changes, as well as how their adaptive capacity can be improved through technical and institutional interventions.” The teams are also planning to do a cost-benefit analysis of the adaptation options which will feed into the action component of this project.
Finding and implementing solutions to a multi-layered problem like water access for the peri-urban poor would need buy-in on several fronts. Recognizing this need, the project seeks to bring together a large number of stakeholders who have the potential of influencing these issues. Adds Dr. Prakash: “This is all the more important because peri-urban areas tend to be neglected by urban as well as by rural authorities – since some of their problems fall under the mandate of neither. The project involves elements of research, stakeholder participation as well as capacity-building of target groups – government and civil society – in meeting these challenges more effectively.”
The opinions expressed on the Searchlight South Asia site are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Rockefeller Foundation.
Sources:
http://saciwaters.org/periurban/Scoping_Study_Report_Khulna.pdf
http://www.saciwaters.org/periurban/res.html
http://www.ids.ac.uk/files/dmfile/GlobalPovertyDataPaper1.pdf
