Posh Delhi colony gets sewage in taps: How urban water systems fail, what needs to change

In the posh South Delhi colony of Gulmohar Park, drinking water pipelines have been delivering sewage-contaminated water for over two weeks now. At the time of writing this column, the point of ingress of contaminated water had not been conclusively identified by the Delhi Jal Board. Many residents have fallen ill from exposure to foul water, and people have had to switch to water tankers and bottled water for their daily needs.

There are underlying systemic factors that lead to the mixing of sewage water with drinking water. From an engineering perspective, the risk of contamination in drinking water pipelines is almost always present: sewage water can enter through even minor leaks and openings in the water pipes, especially when the water supply has been cut off and the pressure in the pipes is slack.

This issue is exacerbated when the pipe network is aged and corroded, when pipes are damaged in construction activity, or when sewage flows and other contaminants come into the area around the pipes.

There are two important policy takeaways from this perspective. One, that that the risk of contamination of drinking water is almost always present, and that it can only be managed, rather than completely eliminated. Second, as the risk to drinking water is from the close interaction of sewage and drinking water pipes, its management requires attention to both drinking water and sewage.

Governance of drinking water and sewage

Our drinking water supply and sewage disposal systems entail very many neighbourhood-level compromises with engineering protocol. As water supply is intermittent, for only a few hours a day, the pipes are often empty, and thus more susceptible to the infiltration of contaminants.

Engineers consider 24-hour water supply systems technically superior — because pipes remain pressurised and resistant to contaminants — but this requires more water and expensive upgrades in the supply infrastructure.

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Moreover, the true state of pipes and networks is never fully known. Except in a few ‘pilot projects’, Indian cities do not have complete digitised maps of water and sewage flows. The field staff of urban agencies might know, by experience, how the supply and drainage infrastructure is organised at the local level, but often, their understanding of local risks is not structurally integrated with institutional decisions and priorities.

The management of sewage is even more complicated and is, at least in part, beyond the direct control and management of any public agency. Even in the most upmarket areas, sewage flows are ‘bypassed’ from blocked or missing sewer lines to storm water drains and natural water channels. Over half the urban population does not have access to any type of organised sewage line, and relies instead on their own septic tanks and pits, which generate foul effluent liquids that seem to have no practical solution, except to flow in open drains and water channels.

Slums, unauthorised colonies and urban villages provide additional layers of complexity: one, because legal rules prevent urban agencies from extending full-scale water and sewage services in these areas (supposedly to disincentivise the proliferation of such settlements) and two, because their winding, narrow and uneven layouts are difficult to build infrastructure for.

In many cities, many agencies of the government are responsible for different parts of the same problem. In Delhi, the Jal Board’s infrastructure co-exists with the MCD, PWD, Irrigation Department and DDA, who have limited ability to coordinate with each other at the street-level.

Institutional gaps and challenges in water and sewage

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There are national environmental law-mandated standards for what constitutes safe drinking water and sewage discharge, but there are considerable institutional lacunae in how this can be realistically delivered.

The right to safe drinking water is loosely defined as part of the constitutionally mandated right to life, but there no clear rules about how it is to be secured.

Sewage discharge standards apply to the point of discharge from sewerage treatment plants, but do not prescribe how it is to be managed before it reaches a treatment facility. The regulations for sewerage that is not connected to sewage lines are just as hard to pin down.

We need to make a distinction between environmental law, by which water quality standards are prescribed for drinking water and sewerage treatment, and the institutional rules that structure the service delivery and infrastructural activities of urban agencies.

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This latter space is thinly developed: there are a number of codes of practice and standards issued by government agencies, but they are not legally enforceable and do not always account for the real-world conditions in which they are to be implemented. Naturally, a one-size fits all protocol might not work, given the variations of conditions across and within cities.

The question of whether water and wastewater are managed by the parastatal agency like the Delhi Jal Board, or by an elected municipal corporation, like the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, is often raised. Statutory water authorities were set up in many large cities in the 1970s and 80s, starting with the Bengaluru Water Supply and Sewerage Board in 1964, supposedly for economies of scale, and to protect large infrastructure projects from the political interference of elected councillors.

By now we know that one structure is not necessarily better than the other. The municipal water supply arrangements of Mumbai or Kolkata are not necessarily better or worse than what the water boards of Bengaluru or Chennai can deliver. Outcomes seem to depend more on the culture of the organisation, and the quality of its leadership, both administrative and political. In practice, state governments also seem to have an important role in providing structure and support to the efforts of their local authorities.

The way forward

Another aspect of the safe water issue is that it cannot be prescribed in one-shot, by plan or regulation, but needs rather a structured pathway in which real time public management improvements can be deployed in sync with administratively issued regulations and notified plans. There is quite a large gap between engineering best practice and the situation in our cities, which can only be addressed in a multi-year framework that priorities the most urgent improvements to human health and environmental outcome from year to year.

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Moreover, public management reforms to deliver safe water must centre the role of the people who will deliver it. Considering the physical nature of water and sewage management, and the complexity of local conditions, it is never going to be possible to digitise all of it, or rely on streamlined centralised systems.

Tech-fixes, digital monitoring and water quality tracking systems and public-private partnerships might all have a role to play, but they can be effective only if they are embedded in a structure of public management, authority and control.

The management of water and sewage requires administrative authorities to be able to be present on sites, and in the neighbourhoods and back alleys where the infrastructure is laid. The ultimate purpose of institutional reform, and its attendant technologies and tools, must be to organise and structure the street-level interface of people, infrastructure and the state.

In other words, because contamination risk can never be fully eliminated, the real task is to build institutional capacity to anticipate and identify risk, and to respond to it effectively.

Arkaja Singh is a Fellow at CPR, New Delhi.