Urban Water Management in India: A Community Perspective (original) (raw)

The relationship between water and society has come to the forefront of critical inquiry in recent years. Water in the global era has acquired more meanings than simply a natural resource and the key to water management not only revolves around the need to deal with the scarcity of the resource, but also the complex interactions on the different aspects of water’s social, cultural, political and ecological significance (Fontein,2008). Political ecologists, sociologists and geographers have attempted to understand water in its varied dimensions, and more broadly, as a key ingredient of the production of cities. They have brought in a critical dimension to the social production of space through water. This paper based on research of a community water intervention in Cuttack, Odisha, attempts an analysis of water management in rapidly growing urban areas in an effort to provide safe water to all. The paper illustrates the idea of community water interventions in urban areas as a way of...