↑Back to Top ©

hrough a brilliant innovation,instead of asking people for money theTPS now takes a little bit of land. This land is later monetised to finance the infrastructure.

enlightened mafia model

Sunita N

“Ultimately, what is money?” he eventually asks, standing up to indicate that the interview is over. “It is the dirt of our hands that is washed clean in death.”

mafia

mafia?”

Many of Sanghwan’s clients are too poor to shell out so much money in one go, so they sometimes pool funds and divide the purchased water among themselves. “Call it a water mafia; call it a business,” Sanghwan says. “I call it a lifeline.” The need for a lifeline dates back to the 1960s, when urban planners grossly underestimated growth in Delhi’s first master plan. Within 20 years, the city’s population had exploded from 2.6 million to 6.2 million, but there was only housing (of varying quality) for 90 percent of that number. Some half a million people wound up in unauthorized colonies—essentially squatter settlements. One of them was Sangam Vihar, where enterprising farmers, including Sanghwan’s parents, divided their personal fields into residential plots and sold them to migrants eager for toeholds in the city.

Raj Tilak Sanghwan, one of the community’s most established tanker bosses, rests on a cot, his beefy forearms crossed over his bulging stomach. He wears a gray polo shirt, blue sweatpants, and white Adidas sneakers that make him look like an aging nightclub bouncer.

More than anyone else, the DJB and the Delhi government [have been] responsible for the rise of the water mafia,” says Dinesh Mohaniya, a member of the Delhi Legislative Assembly who represents Sangam Vihar, one of Delhi’s poorest neighborhoods, that is a hub for water tankers. “If they had supplied piped water to everyone, why would anyone pay the mafia?”

Delhi thus offers a painful warning to other countries where water mafias have sprouted up: Bangladesh, Honduras, and Ecuador, to name just a few.

Teams like this one are ubiquitous in Delhi, where the official water supply falls short of the city’s needs by at least 207 million gallons each day, according to a 2013 audit by the office of the Indian comptroller and auditor general.

Sanghwan is annoyed by concerns about the sustainability of his small empire, about the short-term nature of his profits compared with his work’s potentially devastating long-term implications. Such questions, he says, demonize the poor and water providers like him, while letting the rich and the government off the hook.

Some evenings, when the summer heat is more unbearable than usual, Sanghwan diverts a few thousand gallons of his bounty into a watering hole in the Delhi Ridge, a sparse forest patch behind Sangam Vihar. “It’s for the animals,” he says, referring to the small population of nilgai antelopes that are still occasionally spotted in the area. “They need to drink too.”

will 
ul

Political will, in other words, is critical to achieving the public water system Delhi needs, but it is also nearly impossible to harness. The AAP’s Mohaniya has proposed connecting Sangam Vihar to Delhi’s existing grid, and his party recently pledged to provide nearly 5,300 gallons of free water a month to Delhi homes with formal, metered connections—a promise that excludes about one-fourth of the city, which, according to the 2013 government audit, remains without meters.

“I am yet to see one town or city in India that harvests its rainwater and replenishes its aquifers,” Singh says, adding that his attempts to share his experiences with state officials have been rebuffed. “Governments are not interested because they think they will build another pipeline and find more water.”

Most notable among these lessons is the idea of keeping solutions local. Water doesn’t need to be found in far-flung places; megaprojects have human costs—some 9,500 families were displaced by the Tehri Dam, according to government estimates—and they don’t inspire a much-needed focus on water conservation. With smart planning and investment, water could be drawn from beneath Delhi and other cities and could be distributed over small, well-kept grids or, if necessary, by regulated tankers. “Policymakers need to accept that groundwater is being used and the issue is the unsustainability of its use,” says Sunita Narain, director-general of the Centre for Science and Environment, a public-interest research organization.

orruption is a big reason that major projects routinely flop, or at least fall well short of expectations, and these failures, in turn, are only giving water bosses more power. But counterintuitively, some water activists say, the mafia may offer lessons for a way out of India’s multifaceted water crisis, including an end to the black market.

More recently, Delhi authorities have offered to pay 90 percent of the costs of a new dam in the country’s mountainous northeast that supposedly would supply the city with 275 million gallons of water per day. The rush to sanction such projects is due in no small part to the potential scope of corruption: The more expensive and complex a scheme, the more opportunities there are to skim money.

As Choudhury sits next to his borehole, trucks turn off the highway, use the well to fill up, and then drive away. “I don’t know where they go,” he says. “We just sell the water and mind our own business.”

Krishna says he has drilled into his family’s fields and can now pump some 2,600 gallons and sell it to tankers for about $3, the same going rate as in Delhi. (Sanghwan’s team of trucks from Sangam Vihar has begun going as far as Tilpat to purchase water.)

According to a 2011 report by the Central Ground Water Board, a Delhi-based government regulatory body, there are more than 13 million boreholes across the country.

Sangam Vihar’s 30-year transformation from an agrarian community on Delhi’s periphery into a densely populated urban slum has become something of a model for rural locales increasingly shaped by their proximity to Delhi.

Even with his continued success, Sanghwan admits that it’s getting harder to be in Delhi’s water business. The DJB borehole he operates is supposed to supply 500 homes, but with groundwater levels dipping deep below the earth’s surface, he says, “even the most powerful pump can’t supply more than one or two houses at a time.” On average, each home receives water for a few hours every fortnight.

More than 100 such associations exist in Sangam Vihar today (one for each DJB borehole), according to Mohaniya, but they have no legal basis. They are strictly voluntary, operating without government oversight and with no clear procedures for electing members or collecting money. At this point, almost anyone can form one. According to S.C.L. Gupta, a former legislator from the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, the groups have basically maintained the status quo: “Many of the water-user associations are headed by the same people who were running the wells in the first place,” Gupta says. What was a private mafia, he says, became one that was legitimized by the government. “The same people continued their same business,” he says, “except that the government now paid the electricity bill for each pump.” Sanghwan, in particular, didn’t waste any time jumping on the association bandwagon: He became the head of one in 2014.

But then it announced it intended to dismantle the water mafia—and things turned sour. In January 2014, Mohaniya, the party’s elected legislator from Sangam Vihar, orchestrated a police raid on the community’s water tankers and borehole operators.

At dawn, the crew switches off the generators, stows the hoses in the shack from which they came, and places the tarp back over the boreholes. Few traces of the night’s frenetic activity remain.

“On kar!” someone shouts in Hinglish into the darkness; almost instantly, his orders to “switch it on” are obeyed. Diesel generators, housed in nearby sheds, begin to thrum. Submersible pumps, installed in the borehole’s shafts, drone as they disgorge thousands of gallons of groundwater from deep in the earth. The liquid gushes through the hoses and into the trucks’ tanks.

The Bill provides that the mayor will prepare a budget estimate for the Corporation after considering the budget estimates from all the zonal committees.

The KMC Act, 1976 provides that the budget estimates be prepared by the Standing Committee for taxation and finance and then passed by the Corporation.

model Nagara Raj Bill (2006) and the model municipal law (2003)

Executive functions of the chief commissioner include: (i) selling or leasing properties owned by the Corporation, and (ii) regulating and issuing instructions regarding public streets.

Lease and sale of property The Bill provides that the chief commissioner may sell any property of the Corporation with the prior approval of the state government.  Further, the Corporation can lease its properties for over 30 years, only with the prior sanction of the state government.  The CAG (2020) noted that the need for the sanction of the state government for the sale and lease of properties of the Corporation violates the spirit of self-government laid in the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act, 1992.6 

It had the opposite effect on the interests that ran Gudalur’s timber business.

Eucalyptus and rubber plantations could be deemed forests. Wooded parks in cities would also fall under its scope.

As for China, the excessive government control makes it harder for a global company to operate. “But India is much more trusted by the rest of the world,” he continues. “There is a massive home market, plus there’s a good English language standard which is an advantage over China.”

“Bangalore is getting a bit like Silicon Valley in an Indian context which means there are more engineers, more talent, more startups and more investment coming in,”

Apart from offering support, the government realised the importance of eliminating illegal practices in businesses. And so in 2016 it demonetised all ₹500 and ₹1,000 banknotes and issued new ₹500 and ₹2,000 notes with the aim to curtail the shadow economy and reduce the use of illicit and counterfeit cash which was being used to fund unlawful activity and terrorism. T

“The regulations a decade ago used to be very strict but now we’re seeing a lot of government regulations around supporting startups

after the country attained independence in 1947 that Bangalore evolved into a hub for public sector industries – particularly in aerospace, telecommunications, heavy equipment, space and defence – and saw massive investments from the government. This caused manufacturing giants like The Hindustan Aeronautics, The National Aerospace Laboratories, Bharat Heavy Electronics, Indian Telephone Industries and Bharat Earth Movers to have headquarters based in the Karnataka capital. “Because of this concentration of technical and scientific manpower, Bangalore witnessed the IT revolution in the early 2000,”

“While Mumbai is a bigger and richer city, [the founders] needed a lot of engineers and there’s way more in Bangalore