In 2018, 98.7% of Indians had access to the basic water and sanitation facilities. India faces challenges ranging from sourcing water for its megacities to its distribution network which is intermittent in rural areas with continuous distribution networks just beginning to emerge. Non-revenue water is a challenge.
The share of Indians with access to improved sources of water increased significantly from 72% in 1990 to 88% in 2008 and stood at 98.7% in 2018.UNICEF/WHO Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation estimate for 2008 based on the 2006 Demographic and Health Survey, the 2001 census, other data and the extrapolation of previous trends to 2010. However, many people still lack access to water and sewage infrastructure.
Water supply
Cities In 2005, none among 35 Indian cities with populations above one million distributed water more than a few hours per day, despite generally sufficient infrastructure. Due inadequate water pressure, people struggled collecting water even when available. Service benchmarking carried out 2006 across 28 cities found average supply duration around 3.3 hours daily, ranging from one hour every three days up 18 hours daily. A 2007 study showed that 20 cities recorded average supply duration only 4.3 hours daily. Longest duration reached 12 hours daily at Chandigarh, while lowest remained 0.3 hours at Rajkot. By 2015, 88% total population had access at least basic water, reaching 96% urban and 85% rural areas. Thus, nearly 163 million people lacked access to clean water close to their homes.
In Delhi land usage for residential area varies widely from planned colonies to unplanned slums. Despite the large piped network, with some areas receiving intermittent water supply, there are large areas that lack coverage. Reliance on dubious private water vendors is costly. For example, in Delhi water trucks get water from illegal wells on the banks of the Yamuna River for ( or ).
The supply of cities that depend on surface water is threatened by pollution, increasing water scarcity and conflicts among users. For example, Bangalore depends to a large extent on water pumped since 1974 from the Kaveri river, whose waters are disputed between the states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. As in other Indian cities, the response to water scarcity is to transfer more water over large distances at high costs. In the case of Bangalore, of water is pumped per day over a distance of , thus increasing the city's supply by two-thirds.
Jamshedpur provided 25% of its residents with continuous water supply in 2009. In 2021, some parts of Mumbai got 24 hour supply, others got 19 hours supply or less. Puri became the first city in India to get a piped 24 hour continuous drinking water quality water supply. Trivandrum is the largest Indian city and the only million agglomeration that enjoys uninterrupted hygienic water supply. Chennai has two desalination plants: the Nemmeli and Minjur.
Towns Malkapur is the first Indian town to provide 24/7 water supply with 100 per cent coverage. The programme started in 2008 as a pilot project and soon covered the entire city. The connection is 100 per cent metered with telescopic tariff.
Rural Kaapil has been successful in providing continuous piped water supply to all households.
Other water sources
Rainwater harvesting In the early 21st century, India began heavily investing in rainwater harvesting infrastructure and policy as an urgent response to water scarcity. In 2001, Tamil Nadu became the first Indian state to make rainwater harvesting compulsory in every building to avoid groundwater depletion. In Rajasthan, rainwater harvesting has traditionally been practised by the people of the Thar Desert. Increase in rainwater harvesting efforts across the nation have revived ancient water harvesting systems in Rajasthan, such as the chauka system from the Jaipur district. Other large cities like Pune, Mumbai and Bangalore all have varying rules for mandatory rainwater harvesting, especially in new buildings. In 2002, the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai required all new buildings over to have rainwater harvesting infrastructure. The law was expanded in 2007 to . The goal was to ensure buildings had enough water to last them through non-monsoon seasons. The process included a catchment system, an initial flush, and extensive filtering. As of 2021, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) reported 3000 newly constructed or redeveloped buildings with rainwater harvesting infrastructure. However, many residents have complained that the stored water is contaminated, turning saline and brackish. Experts and residents argue that BMC authorities have done little to take implementation seriously, and the actual effectiveness of the rainwater harvesting mandate is unknown.
While rainwater harvesting in an urban context has gained traction in recent years, evidence points toward rainwater harvesting in rural India since ancient times. The type of system varied depending on the geography and culture of the region. Himachal Pradesh, for example, relied on kuhls, a community-owned rainwater irrigation system. Maharashtra predominately used bhandara phads, a check dam which lowers the velocity of flow from rivers and reduces erosion. On the onset of British rule in the early 19th century, many of these systems were abandoned. Environmentalists and scholars now believe that agricultural communities should revive ancient techniques to allow for rainwater harvesting to source the water needs of the community.
Sanitation
A formal sanitation programme was first launched in 1954, followed by Central Rural Sanitation Programme in 1986, Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) in 1999, Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan in 2012 and Swachh Bharat Mission in 2014. The growth of sanitation policy also reflected a broader shift in how water and sanitation were understood in India. Conditions that had often been treated as household or local matters came to be framed more clearly as public health and development concerns, especially in rural areas where infrastructure remained weak. Coming to light after the Total Sanitation Campaign in 1999, the link between rural sanitation and toilet coverage to national policy targets became very clear
In 2020, according to the World Bank data, 72% Indians, 68% Pakistanis, and 54% Bangladeshi have access to the basic sanitation facilities. In 2015, 44% had access to basic sanitation, or 65% in urban areas and 34% in rural areas. In 2017, at least basic sanitation increased to 59.5%. Between 2014 and 2019, the Government in India has built around 110 million toilets, all across India, due to which the basic sanitation coverage went up from 38.7% in October 2014 to 93.3% in 2019.
However, official coverage figures do not necessarily reflect the reliability or sustained use of services. In urban areas, many cities continue to receive water only for a few hours per day, while in rural areas access may exist on paper but remain uneven in practice because of irregular supply, weak maintenance, or limited long-term functionality. Studies of sanitation in rural India have also noted that toilet construction does not automatically eliminate open defecation, meaning that infrastructure growth and lived access do not always move at the same pace.
For years, most Indians depended on on-site sanitation facilities, mainly pit latrines in rural areas. The government has been investing heavily in building sanitation units, in a nation-wide campaign called the Swachh Bharat Mission. Between 2014 and 2020, the Indian government managed to make household toilets accessible to over 99% of the population. This translates to a total of 110 million toilets build since 2014, according to Statista. Preceding this success is the success of the Slum Sanitation Programme in Mumbai that has provided access to sanitation for a quarter million slum dwellers. Sewage, where available, is often in a bad state. In Delhi the sewage network has lacked maintenance over the years and overflow of raw sewage in open drains is common, due to blockage, settlements and inadequate pumping capacities. The capacity of the 17 existing wastewater treatment plants in Delhi is adequate to cater a daily production of waste water of less than 50% of the drinking water produced. Of the 892 million people in the world that defecate openly, some 15 million live in India, making it the country with the highest number of people who defecate in the open. This has serious public health implications.
For this reason, scholars and policy analysts have argued that the limits of sanitation policy in India cannot be understood through construction totals alone. They have pointed instead to uneven implementation, differences between regions, and the continued importance of local social conditions in shaping whether new facilities are used, maintained, and trusted. In this view, the central problem is not only expanding infrastructure, but ensuring that services remain usable and meaningful in everyday life.
A specific Indian problem is also the (officially prohibited) "manual scavenging" which is connected to the officially banned caste system, and relates to unsafe and undignified emptying of toilets and pits, as well as handling of raw, untreated human excreta. As of 2003, it was estimated, that only 27% of India's wastewater was being treated, with the remainder flowing into rivers, canals, groundwater or the sea. For example, the sacred Ganges river is infested with diseases and in some places "the Ganges becomes black and septic. Corpses, of semi-cremated adults or enshrouded babies, drift slowly by." In 2008, NewsWeek described Delhi's sacred Yamuna River as "a putrid ribbon of black sludge" where the concentration of fecal bacteria is 10,000 times the recommended safe maximum despite a 15-year programme to address the problem. Cholera epidemics are not unknown.
East Kolkata wetlands In 2018, The Hindu reported that the East Kolkata wetlands, the world's largest biological sewage treatment facility, had been used to clean the sewage of Kolkata for several decades through the use of algae. This natural system, in use since the 1930s, was discovered by Dhrubajyoti Ghosh, an ecologist and municipal engineer in the 1970s, while he was working in the region. Ghosh worked for decades to protect the wetlands. It had been a practice in Kolkata, one of the five largest cities in India, for the municipal authorities to pump sewage into shallow ponds (bheris). Under the heat of the tropical sun, algae proliferated in these bheris, converting the sewage into clean water, which in turn was used by villagers to grow paddy and vegetables. This almost 100-year-old system treats 750 million litres of wastewater per day, providing livelihoods for 100,000 people in the vicinity. For his work, Ghosh was included in the UN Global 500 Roll of Honour in 1990 and received the Luc Hoffmann award in 2016.
Health impact
The lack of adequate sanitation and safe water has significant negative health impacts including diarrhoea, referred to by travellers as the Delhi Belly (Travelers' diarrhea), and experienced by about 10 million visitors annually. The dismal working conditions of sewer workers are another concern. A survey of the working conditions of sewage workers in Delhi showed that most of them suffer from chronic diseases, respiratory problems, skin disorders, allergies, headaches and eye infections. Various other cities in India have a record of unsafe drinking water. Municipal water in Visakhapatnam is contaminated with too much chlorine and pharmaceuticals which cause headache, short-term memory loss and loss of focus.
Responsibility for water supply and sanitation