The Water Crisis is not a futuristic problem it is a present disaster...

Picture the outskirts of any major Indian city— Pune, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, or Lucknow. You will find a patchwork of half-built colonies, old agricultural land slowly turning into construction sites, and families who are neither fully rural nor truly urban. They live in what planners call peri-urban areas and right now, these places are sitting on a quiet crisis that most people have not yet noticed.

Written and published by Deepak Sriram, Delhi, 28 May 2026, Thursday, 1:30 AM IST

By 2047, India is expected to require 230 million new housing units and nearly 500 new cities. Today's peri-urban regions will become tomorrow's urban centres. The question is not whether this transformation will happen it will. The question is whether the country will be ready for it, especially when it comes to the most basic need of all: water.

The Problem Nobody Owns

The core trouble with peri-urban areas is surprisingly simple, no one is officially responsible for them. When a village starts growing into a town, it falls into a gap between the rural Panchayat system and the urban municipal framework. Water pipelines from the city do not reach it. Proper drainage does not exist. Borewells are dug haphazardly until they run dry.

The in-migration of population and emergence of new activities is transforming such areas, with visible changes in land use, occupational patterns, reduced farming, and rapid growth of built structures. Inadequate planning and governance of peri-urban areas by local governments is resulting in various problems, and with India urbanising further, the pressure on these fringes will only grow.

Cities like Bengaluru and their surrounding peri-urban areas have already been grappling with severe groundwater depletion, driven primarily by over-extraction. This is not a future risk, it is happening right now, in dozens of cities across the country.

Why This Happened And What the Law Says

The 74th Constitutional Amendment was passed in 1992 with exactly this problem in mind. It envisioned a three-tier local governance structure, village Panchayats, Nagar Panchayats for transitional areas, and full municipal bodies for cities. The first step to fix the administrative vacuum is establishing Nagar Panchayats, as envisioned under the 74th Constitutional Amendment, with legal recognition accompanied by stronger institutional capacity and accountability.

The problem is that most states have simply not done this. Peri-urban settlements continue to expand without being formally recognised, which means they cannot access government water schemes, cannot levy user fees to maintain infrastructure, and cannot attract investment. They exist, grow, and struggle, entirely off the grid of formal governance.

The 2017 Model Groundwater Bill does provide an institutional framework in line with the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments, allowing for the creation of district groundwater councils responsible for coordinating water security plans between panchayats and municipalities, and mandating routine assessments to determine social and environmental impacts. But this model bill has not been uniformly adopted by states, leaving the legal framework incomplete.

What Needs to Change And What It Will Mean

Urban water infrastructure alone will require an estimated $150 billion in investment over the next 15 years. The sector currently remains heavily dependent on government transfers, with user fees often too low to even cover basic operations and maintenance.

A specialised Swachh Bharat Mission 3.0 focused on peri-urban sanitation should prioritise faecal sludge management, treatment plants in underserved regions, GPS-monitored desludging trucks, and mini-cesspool vehicles for narrow settlements. Integrating sanitation costs into monthly water bills through a small levy could also improve financial sustainability.

The good news is that workable solutions already exist in India. In Uttarakhand's peri-urban areas, nearly 544,000 people in 22 towns, covering 95 percent of homes now receive 16 to 24 hours of clean piped water each day, after years of struggle and targeted investment. It proves that with the right institutional will and funding, peri-urban water governance can be fixed.

India's cities already contribute 63 percent of the country's GDP, a share projected to rise to 75 percent by 2036. If the peri-urban fringes that feed these cities collapse under the weight of water scarcity and poor sanitation, that growth story stalls. The choice, as analysts have noted, is between planning now or inheriting a generation of chronic problems later. India is at that fork in the road today.