Network of pipes carrying fresh water to the houses. These pipes have all been laid out by local plumbers.

Dharavi, a very dense, self-built settlement located at the heart of Greater Mumbai, has developed its own infrastructure over time. The system, built incrementally by local plumbers and residents is a complex one.  Urban planners and architects typically dismiss locally built infrastructure and instead advocate the redevelopment of the entire area.

Together with Shyam (Dharavi Resident and URBZ researcher), we explored the water systems in Dharavi. As we walked along the lanes of Dharavi, we encountered several pipes on the ground surface. Small pipes branch out of bigger pipes, while other pipes carry sewage water. Not every house in Dharavi has direct access to fresh water. But most have pipes hanging outside. The longer the roll of pipe, the further is the fresh water tap from the house. Along the lanes, we also observed open drains that simultaneously carry sewage and storm water. These sewage drains are sometimes contaminated by pollutants from small industries and are typically filled up by insoluble things like plastic articles.

Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC)

The big pipe carrying water from the BMC and the network of smaller pipes taking water to the houses. The BMC destroyed existing pipes to put its own, however no water was flowing through the BMC pipes for a while, so the older pipes had to be repaired.

When BMC makes some official water connections, they leave some extra connections and the BMC needs to be bribed in order to informally avail these extra connections.

It takes five houses to come together to get a connection for water from the BMC. Each house ends up shelling around 3500 Rupees for this kind of shared connection. When a legal water connection is established, BMC workers make sure that openings for few additional connections are made but not given to anyone. If one needs access to these spare connections, which are not officially accounted for by the BMC, they have to bribe BMC officers.  Such connections typically cost 5000 Rupees each.

Availability of Water

Reel of pipe used to bring water from a tap away from the house.

The water is released by BMC in the mornings for approximately 2 hours at varying times in different areas. The pressure of water depends upon the proximity of the house to the main water pipe. When several small pipes are connected to one big pipe, the person staying closest to the big pipe receives water at a high pressure. At times no water is released. This uncertainty is a great stress factor for the residents. And in such instances, either the resident takes help from the neighbors or has to buy water from stores or the tankers thus incurring an extra expense.

Quality of Water

The fresh water pipes bring in murky water initially so the residents need to let it go and wait for clean water in order to store it for cleaning and drinking purposes. Most residents filter the water using a fine fabric and boil the water for drinking purpose. For some residents boiling water is an extra expense that they cannot afford.

Matka used for storing drinking water. The water is usually boiled or filtered through a fine fabric before being stored.

It is very interesting to study the intricate water system in the user generated habitat of Dharavi. The complex network of pipes is legible to the residents and local plumbers alone. They are the only ones who can recognize their particular water connection pipe. There is always a sense of insecurity among the residents of Dharavi as they do all they can to ensure that their connection is safe and the water available. Houses that have no connection rely on their neighbors. The people of Dharavi have been very innovative in working with the water system and have succeeded in improving their conditions. There were times when people had to form queues early in the morning for water.  And not everybody would make it to the tap before the water stopped. Till about a generation ago, wells were present in many parts of Dharavi. Only a handful wells can be found in Dharavi today. The availability of piped water and the lack of space has made them defunct.

Storing water for washing and cleaning in water drums.

A more cooperative attitude of the BMC would definitely help to improve the infrastructure. A very large number of houses have not received their water bills for several years. Many households have suddenly been asked to pay huge amounts of money (accumulated water bills) to sustain their water connection. The way people have adapted to a dysfunctional system is inspiring and can teach planners and architects a great deal. The ability of Dharavi residents to streamline available resources in the most efficient way is extremely impressive.

This article summarizes preliminary research  by Sameera Rao, a graduate student in Landscape Architecture at Ball State University and intern with URBZ, July-August 2011.

Trouble in paradise: Iron Ore Mine in Bicholim, North Goa

We have been busy looking at Goa’s complex urban system and networks together with a group of graduate landscape architecture students from Sweden. This studio, taking place from Feb 14th to 25th, is part of a year-long programme organized by Henrietta Palmer and Michael Dudley of the Royal Institute of Arts in Stockholm, and the Institute of Urbanology in Goa. The group was also joined by masters students of the Dr. Bhanuben Nanavati College of Architecture for Women (BNCA) based in Pune.

Goa, which is the smallest state in India, can be conceptualized as an urban system made of a network of villages and a few bigger towns of max 100,000 people. These are interspersed with fields and forests and each settlement is connected to the others through an intricate web of small roads. As is the case in many Indian cities, large infrastructure projects along with savage real estate speculation and corrupt politics are challenging the unique spatial organization of Goa.

Savoi Veren village near Ponda, which predates Portuguese colonization, is now surrounded by mines.

Historically, this spatial logic has been connected to the availability of water sources and river systems which traditionally Goan villages and hamlets were dependent on for their survival. The delicate balance of containing groundwater salinity by blocking rain water flows through intricate water management, of painstaking rain water conservation through dependency on its forests (now being ravaged by mines) and of dependence on wells for water supply are all factors that are miraculously still alive even as one part of Goa gets connected to piped water, roads and bridges.

If modern urban societies are concerned with environmental issues then a good look at Goa’s habitats and how they are embedded in its water system becomes something that everyone can learn a lot from. If the new vision that Goa is looking towards for its own growth and future need an anchoring for its regional development plans, then that vision needs to be anchored in its historical spatial logic, arranged through its water ways and systems.

Two students of the Royal Institute of Arts taking pictures of a barge transporting Iron ore on the Mandovi river.

Right now, Goa’s system of villages, towns, fields and forests are being super imposed by a planning logic connected to mainstream mechanisms of connectivity and mobility, of real estate development and aspirations. The people of Goa are struggling with the balancing out of all these factors and are looking for ways to organize Goa’s growth and future in a manner that does justice to its special cultural and historical distinctiveness that is  intimately tied to its physical, environmental and spatial logic. In a very small way, this group has tried to address some of these issues to the best of its ability.

After more than a week of travel, observations, meetings with experts and activists, the group will make a series of presentations that directly or indirectly connects with the idea of Goa’s complex water system as the base of its spatial logic and open the doors for more research in this broad area. Please come to the students’ presentation at Panjim Inn in Fontainhas, Goa, Friday February 25th at 5PM.

Students interacting with Dean D’Cruz, one of Goa’s most respected architect who is also working on the Goa regional plan.

Click here for more pictures of the studio in Goa.

Read more on Goa as an urban network on airoots.

We have been spending the last few days speaking to shopkeepers, building owners and residents about the road in front of the KHOJ office. In the past 10 years the road has been redone and destroyed 4 or 5 times. We tried to understand why. It quickly became clear that this wasn’t just a technical issue. The road could never be repaired and maintained without the active support and involvement of the people living alongside it.

The road issue is also linked to the water system. The pipes under the road are completely plugged and during the rainy season used water comes back up to the surface and inundates the road. Last July-August going to the KHOJ office meant walking through sewage. The shopkeepers were particularly affected since no business could happen.

The stagnant sewage water became a breeding ground for mosquitoes. The three queens: Malaria, Chikungunya and Dengue are endemic in Khirkee. Many people told us how they had been sick for long stretches of time, including colleagues at KHOJ.

Historically, the water problem emerged with water pumps, which suddenly meant that more water was getting consumed and that evacuation had to be organized more systematically. Masterji, an elderly resident who knows Khirkee since pre-independence days said that before water pipes and pumps were installed no drainage system was needed.

Khirkee, being an “unauthorized colony”, the authorities are not taking any responsibility regarding the water system. Whatever exists now has been built by groups of residents (it is a user-generated water-system). The water comes from the municipality but the pipes have been installed locally. Since then many new 6 to 7 stories-high buildings have emerged along the road, substantially increasing water consumption. The existing sewage pipes which were laid down fifteen years ago have become too small to take the load produced by the new high-rises. To add to the problem all kinds of plastic waste and rubble that is thrown on the streets ends its journey in the pipes,  plugs it.

Since the pipes are below the ground they are much harder to clean. To clean them someone must go below the road through a manhole and manually remove some of the junk plugging the pipe. The rest is pumped out by a machine.

To make matters worse, according to some of the residents, trying to unplug the blocks in the sewage with high pressure pumps may cause pipes to burst.

There are several suggestions being made which we will factor in our research and action: to retrace the water flows through older well systems and use them to absorb rain and storm waters, thus easing the pressure on the sewage and other systems; having regular clean ups of the sewage, plugging the points of entry of dry and rough garbage so that systems do not get clogged, so on and so forth.

We began by building on Pooja Sood’s suggestion of naming the road – Hamaari Sadak which means Our Road, and inviting the neighbourhood to discuss suggestions and proposals during the workshop on Monday.

One thing is certain, the road and water issues can only be addressed by a coming together of the residents.

Nanikatechi is a small village three hours from Ahmedabad, in the Surendranagar district of Gujarat. When I arrived here, I wanted to learn about mechanisms people have developped to cope with water scarcity in this extremely dry region.  I took interest especially in the micro scale rainwater harvesting systems the village has been building up in the past five years with the help of local and international NGOs and researchers.

Well, I learned another lesson instead: A lesson about water quality.  Actually, today there is no water scarcity per se in this region.  There are three sources of water: The oldest are the borewells, from which groundwater is extracted.  Then there is the water from the distant Narmada river which is brought in through a network of concrete canals from Southern Gujarat. And finally, there is rainwater.

The reason why the rainwater harvesting was initiated in Nanikatechi was for the sake of health.  I stayed with a small group of Christian nuns who are all trained as nurses, and who settled in Nanikatechi with a Father, Regi, to deliver health services to Nanikatechi and the surrounding villages – they run a small hospital, and they distribute medicines to one village in the area on each day of the week.  Just a few years ago, many residents were suffering from kidney stones because they had been drinking the ground water, which in this region is saline, so Regi started collaborating with NGOs in 2007 to develop a more healthy source of drinking water.  This is why rainwater started to be captured for consumption.

The salty groundwater is also one of the reasons for the lack of crop diversity in this region: irrigation allows for two harvests per year, and groundwater has been used for irrigation for decades.  Though Nanikatechi  is now connected to the Narmada water network, that water is expensive, rationed and subject to annual fluctuation.  That is why many farmers, ever since colonial times, grow exclusively cotton – a crop that is tolerant to salinity.  Groundwater levels, however, are dropping at a staggering speed.  Also, once soils are irrigated with saline water, it will take one full monsoon season to wash the soil so other crops, like wheat, maize, or buckwheat, can grow there again.  As a result, many fields lay idle during dry season and yield very scarce harvests.  The issue is that cotton is not edible, and prices are dictated by a global market.  That is why many farmers in Nanikatechi cannot even assure decent nutrition to their families.  In fact, until recently, 75% of the population migrated to work in the service, construction, or manufacturing industries, often under precarious conditions, during dry season, and only returned to the village for monsoon season and, sometimes, for the holidays.  This is why ponds started to be built for capturing and storing rainwater on site for irrigation.

Both the tanks and the ponds operate at a single household scale.  A family of 5, for example, requires a rainwater tank of 7 x 9 x 6.5 ft to provide for water for drinking and cooking purposes year-round, while a family of 10 would use the rainwater for drinking only. The tank is usually buried in front of the house, doubling as a terrace.  Filling this tank only takes 2 to 3 good monsoon rains with a roof surface of 400 to 500 sqare feet.  After the first rain has cleaned the roof in the beginning of the rainy season each year, the tank is connected to the gutter by a simple 4″ PVC pipe.  Since 2008, 160 tanks have been built, and 30 more are under construction.  The Jeet Prakash Trust, which Father Regi is a part of, subsidizes the construction financially, covering 60% (or about Rs. 14.000) of the cost.  It also assists with the maintenance, and monitors the operation.

A rainwater pond that enables two harvests and, therefore, a 100% increase in income, would be about 40.000 cubic feet or 180 x 60 x 5 ft in size (enough to irrigate 8 acres of farmland). Here, the trust pais for about 50% of the cost (or Rs. 30 per 100 cubic feet).   Both ponds and tanks can be built with human labor, using very simple technology.  Once operating, a set of rules needs to be applied in order to ensure for the system to work properly.  Taking advantage of the subsidies for the villagers means to commit to these rules  – including, for the drinking water tanks, specific annual cleaning procedures, the use of chlorine tablets once a month, and opening the tank only once in three days to keep the contamination with dirt to a minimum.  For the irrigation ponds, farmers need to attend classes about crop rotation and double/triple crop farming techniques, ensure desiltation of the pond and pipes during dry season, and diversify their crop cultivation.  Failure to comply with these rules results in having to pay for a professional to do it.

This is what the second lesson learned in Nanikatechi is about: a system is only worth as much as it is appreciated by its users.  In theory, the benefits of both the ponds and the tanks are so obvious that one should think everyone in the village would want to install one.  In theory, also, the fact that each family has their own system is an incentive for villagers to maintain this system carefully. “It took us almost two years to really kick off the project,” sais Father Regi, “we ended building the first few drinking water tanks completely free of cost, and we had a demonstration field installed on our property to prove the benefits of the double crop techniques and rainwater irrigation to the local farmers.”   After that, however, it quickly became clear that drinking rainwater improved health conditions considerably, and those farmers who did invest in a farm pond were able to increase their crop yields from the very first year.  The Father expects constuction of new tanks and ponds to continue even after the subsidies expire, not only in Nanikatechi itself, but also in other villages in the region. However, from what I have learned during my visits and conversations I had with tank owners, someone will still have to monitor and control maintenance on a regular basis for it to work properly.

Building a rainwater harvesting system, even at the micro scale, is a long term project.

Water scarcity is a part of daily life in the quasi-desert state of Gujarat, and its largest city, Ahmedabad. With the city experiencing hyper growth, the tremendous pressure on its infrastructure is in-your-face, and groundwater tables have been falling at the rate of 2-3 meters per year because 70-80% of the city’s water supply has come from borewells. Those can be seen all along the road even today that additional water is carried in through canals from the distant Narmada river, some 200 km away. In spite of this, the daily water supply per capita today is a mere 140 litres (as opposed to 180 litres envisioned by the city ’s water plan about ten years ago). From the policy side, the city has adopted some new water regulations after a major drought hit the state of Gujarat in 1999. It now mandates that all new developments above a certain size to either capture rainwater for direct use, or to collect it in a percolation pond for filtration and much-needed recharge of the ground water.

In fact, several interesting layers of sophisticated water management infrastructures from different times in history can be traced underneath the organic urban structure in the dense old city of Ahmedabad.  Its distribution network dates back from colonial times.  Integrated in the old town’s community-based spatial morphology of ‘pols’, different sized neighborhoods organized around semi-public courtyards, is a system of fresh water supply and sewage pipes that cater to each house. It lies beneath the street surface, but is made legible by tall poles, indicating the location of the pipes and direction of the water flow.

Ahmedabad also has a long history of rainwater harvesting. The oldest example for this are the famous vavs, the monumental step wells that used to provide rainwater, collected during monsoon season, to the community year-round.  These structures are multi-storey underground water tanks shaped such that a series of stairs, on one side, would allow for comfortable access to the water level as it is slowly falling over the course of the dry season, while there is also a direct connection to the lowest point of the well from where water can be pulled up to the surface in a vessel. The step wells are adorned with artfully carved pillars and arches, and the climate inside is cool and pleasant. Examples of step wells that still exist today in Ahmedabad include Dada Hari Vav and Adalaj Vav, both built in the 16th century, as well as Mata Bhavari Vav, which is even older. What is interesting is that places of worship (both Hindu and Muslim) are either integrated in each of the vavs or can be found directly adjacent. Those, today, are still in use while the wells themselves have dried up.

The traditional wooden residential structures as well as many of the places of worship of the Old City incorporate a smaller scale version of rainwater harvesting. Water used to be captured from the second rainfall of the monsoon onwards, from the pitched roofs, then carried down through copper gutters and chains to be stored in limestone-lined deep tubewells (between 30 and 50 ft deep at 2-3 ft in diameter). The relatively small scale (25.000 – 30.000 litres per family and year) of the wells implies that this water was used mainly for drinking and cooking. The use of copper and limestone as materials ensures the high quality of the water to last for months; it is in fact far superior to the quality of water from other sources, including today’s municipal water supply. Maintenance and operation efforts, given the simplicity of the historic structures and durability of materials, are relatively low.

Since the construction of a large scale municipal water supply system, however, most of these rainwater harvesting systems, much like the step wells, have fallen idle. Interestingly, though, Nirav Panchal of the Heritage Project of the Municipal Corporation of Ahmedabad has explained to me that people have been approaching the city in the past five years in search of advice as to rehabilitate their rainwater harvesting structures for daily use .

Why would people want to do that? It improves their quality of life very directly by providing for the safest, healthiest, and best tasting drinking water one may hope for, and it is reliable in the long term (a tubewell fills up with two or three good rains).

The most important thing for the city remains the combined impact of many, many micro scale systems

This highlights the role culture and awareness play not only for rainwater harvesting, but also for water conservation and grey water re-use, and ultimately for the water safety of the city. What shapes the water problems of entire regions, according to Prof. C.N. Ray of CEPT University in Ahmedabad, is the mentality brought towards the matter by people. He argues that this is why coping mechanisms have traditionally been more sophisticated, and per capita demand has been much lower, in areas that have historically experienced water scarcity, such as Gujarat, than in those with more plentiful water supply.  It is incredibly important to harness what remains of the pre-’near-unlimited-water-from-the-tab’ mentality.  Thas means to embrace the idea to restore historical systems, and even to construct new mechanisms for rainwater harvesting at a household or small community scale.  The traditional example shows how simple this is provided some basic design parameters are taken into account.

Now imagine this happening citywide. The simple collection and storage of rainwater from roofs could contribute about 10% to the freshwater supply, while also improving public health. Especially if combined with a similar system of grey water re-use, this could dramatically reduce the per capita use of tap water, and make for a much more sustainable growth.  Not only in Ahmedabad, but also in other cities and even countries.