Groundwater Safety net can support but strengthening efforts are needed

By  Adarsh Dalavi

Adarsh Dalavi offers reflections from an equity and inclusion lens from his work in Ichalkarnji, Maharashtra, India on urban water supply security. Views expressed are that of authors own and not reflecting the current or past organisations he is associated with.

Ichalkaranji is a fast-industrialising textile town in Kolhapur district, Maharashtra, offers a sharp, close-up view of something playing out across mid-sized cities throughout India and the Global South: a water system that was never designed for climate volatility, now buckling under it — with the poorest residents absorbing the shock first and hardest. It is a town of roughly four lakh people, best known for its powerloom industry, whose growth has quietly outpaced the infrastructure meant to sustain it. What’s unfolding here isn’t a dramatic, headline-grabbing disaster — it’s the slower, grinding kind of water insecurity that rarely makes the news but shapes daily life for hundreds of millions of people across the country, one missed tap-water day at a time.

Unreliable water supply system in an expanding city

Ichalkaranji draws its water from the Panchganga and Krishna rivers. On paper, the city has a nominal supply of 108 million litres per day. In practice, treatment and transmission losses mean residents actually receive somewhere between 43 and 68 MLD — less than half of what the numbers promise, according to a 24×7 water supply strategy study for the city by Center for Water And Sanitation, CDRF, CEPT University, Ahmedabad. Most households get piped water only once every five or six days. The current water supply system is old and leaky, leading to temporary failures and water supply disruptions. This means water supply service is unreliable at times, affecting the most vulnerable population in the city the most, forcing them to rely on other options.

Photo 1: Pipe burst during fieldwork in Ichalkaranji (Credit: Adarsh Dalavi)

The Panchganga, already burdened by upstream municipal and industrial effluent, becomes seasonal in the driest months, forcing the city to rely almost entirely on the Krishna during summer — part of a wider pattern flagged in the Central Pollution Control Board’s national river water quality assessments, which routinely identify Maharashtra’s rivers among the most polluted stretches in the country. This is not a one-off drought story. It’s a structural vulnerability: a city whose primary water source shrinks and degrades in quality precisely when demand peaks — a pattern climate projections suggest will intensify, not ease, in the coming decade.

Groundwater as the informal safety net

Where surface water fails, groundwater fills the gap. The Ichalkaranji Municipal Corporation supplies water to the slums through roughly 1,100 borewells; additionally, residents have drilled an estimated 15,000 more, most unregistered and unmetered (pers comms). The Maharashtra Groundwater (Development and Management) Act, 2009 gives authorities the power to restrict drilling in over-exploited zones — but enforcement is thin, and worse, is often politically undermined. New borewells tend to appear just before elections, a visible gesture of responsiveness that quietly deepens a resource crisis. Groundwater levels drop during the peak summers leading to irregular water supply from municipal borewells forcing residents to look for other options (pers comms).

This is where climate stress and weak governance compound each other: a shrinking, unregulated aquifer is not a resilient backup — it’s a second failure point waiting to happen.

Photo 2: One of the borewell standposts in Lalnagar slum (Credit: Adarsh Dalavi)

Photo 3: Internet of Things based pumping unit for one of the borewells of Ichalkaranji Municipal Corporation (Credit: Adarsh Dalavi)

Resilience is not evenly distributed

The households best placed to absorb an unreliable supply — private borewells, storage tanks, the means to pay for tanker deliveries — are rarely the households in Ichalkaranji’s 26 informal settlements. Roughly four hundred thousand people live in the city, and its slum communities disproportionately lack household connections, relying instead on shared standposts and whatever water they can queue for. It is women, overwhelmingly, who carry the daily burden of sourcing water when the taps run dry.

Slum dwellers are most vulnerable in the city of Ichalkaranji when it comes to water supply. This is the exclusion story hiding inside every water-stress statistic: climate and infrastructure shocks don’t fall evenly. They fall hardest on those with the least capacity to adapt — and any resilience strategy that doesn’t explicitly design for this will simply reproduce the inequity it claims to solve.

The policy exists. The implementation doesn’t.

Ichalkaranji is not just an example of a crisis; it also shows that Maharashtra already has the policy framework needed for a climate-resilient and inclusive response. The Maharashtra State Water Policy (2019) mandates rainwater harvesting and targets 30% reuse of treated wastewater within five years. A parallel state policy mandating wastewater reuse, introduced in 2017, prioritises treated sewage for industrial and non-potable use, including for cooling thermal power plants. Ichalkaranji has even piloted IoT-based borewell monitoring — a genuinely useful adaptive tool.

This local picture also sits inside a national push: the Jal Jeevan Mission (Urban) guidelines explicitly target recycling used water to meet at least 20% of city water demand, and frame water security through the lens of climate resilience and equitable access. But none of this is yet operationalised at the scale Ichalkaranji needs. The gap isn’t technical knowledge or even policy ambition — its institutional coordination, enforcement, and the political will to prioritize long-term aquifer health over short-term electoral optics.

Photo 4: Water Storage to cope with irregular water supply (Photo: Adarsh Dalavi)

What resilience could look like in Ichalkaranji

A climate-resilient, inclusive water future for Ichalkaranji would mean:

• Enforcing existing groundwater regulation instead of treating borewell permits as a campaign tool
• Recharging aquifers deliberately, through mandated rainwater harvesting tied to building approvals
• Closing the loop on wastewater, turning treated effluent into a real industrial water source and easing pressure on the rivers
• Designing distribution around equity, not just aggregate supply — so informal settlements aren’t the default shock absorber
• Opening up data and decision-making to residents, so citizen monitoring and participation become part of how the system self-corrects

Why this matters beyond one city

Ichalkaranji’s story sits squarely inside the conversation the Climate Resilient Inclusive WASH Hub wants to have: climate change doesn’t create water crises from nothing — it exposes and accelerates the fault lines that governance failures and inequity have already carved. Under Sustainable Development Goal 6, universal and equitable access isn’t a separate goalpost from climate adaptation; in cities like Ichalkaranji, they’re the same fight.

If mid-sized industrial towns like Ichalkaranji can turn existing policy into enforced practice — with informal communities and women’s daily water burden treated as central design constraints, not afterthoughts — they could become genuine models for climate-resilient urban water governance across semi-arid India.

Author bio

Adarsh Dalavi is a water professional with experience in research, implementation and capacity building projects in the Water and Sanitation sector in India. He can be reached at adarshdalavi659@gmail.com and LinkedIn