The National Water Mission (NWM) of the Ministry of Jal Shakti (MoJS) on 15 May 2025, turned its monthly “Water Talk” toward a constituency that rarely commands the front pages: India’s small towns. Under the banner “Community-based water and wastewater resilience in small towns,” the 59th session assembled civil servants, engineers and grassroots practitioners to ask a deceptively simple question—how can places that lie beyond the metros become laboratories for a water-secure future?
A policy frame built around people
Opening the discussion, Mission Director Archana Varma set the tone with a blunt reminder: “Water cannot be just a government business; when communities come together there is strength in unity,” she insisted, arguing that India’s water strategy must be “whole-of-society” rather than “scheme-of-government.”
Varma anchored her plea in the Jal Sanchay Jan Bhagidari campaign, launched by the Prime Minister in Surat on 6 September 2024. The initiative set itself a seemingly audacious pre-monsoon target: build one million low-cost artificial recharge structures—from borewell recharge pits to check-dams—without releasing “a single paisa” of direct central funding. By mid-May 2025 more than 1.5 million structures had been completed, “evidence of the huge support that we have got from the community,” Varma reported.
Scale has translated into measurable hydrological dividends. Preliminary groundwater assessments show an additional 11.39 billion cubic metres of recharge — “bigger than the live storage of the Indira Sagar dam,” Varma noted—proving that “small is actually big when it comes to water conservation.”
Yet policy, she cautioned, cannot rely on supply augmentation alone. By 2050, India’s water demand is projected to reach 1,180 billion m³ against a renewable supply of 1,126 billion m³, leaving a structural deficit that “no amount of new canals can close unless we reduce, recycle and recharge.” Hence the ministry’s parallel push for behaviour change, rainwater harvesting mandates for rooftops over 100 m², and a sharper urban focus. “Towns have not yet got the attention they deserve,” she stated, pledging that the next phase of Jal Sanchay will work as closely with municipal corporations as it does with district panchayats.
BORDA’s field lens: three stories of resilience
To ground the policy arc in lived experience, the floor passed to the Bremen Overseas Research and Development Association (BORDA), a German development NGO active in many parts of India. Regional Director Sai Prakash and Integrated Water Management lead Ansu Cherian walked participants through three case studies that, together, read like a travelogue of constraint-driven ingenuity.
Keylong, Himachal Pradesh – beating the freeze
High-altitude Keylong sees pipes seize and springs run dry as temperatures dive to –20 °C for half the year. After 18 months of intense dialogue the Public Health Engineering Department and the local residents’ association piloted a continuous-pressurised, 24×7 supply for 100 households. Copper-wire heat tracing, locally sourced insulation and strict community bylaws (each new household must install a recharge trench) cut connection costs by more than half—from Rs. 1,000 to Rs. 450 a running metre—and, for the first time, water flowed even in mid-winter. Officials from Shimla, Nepal and Bhutan have since made study visits to replicate the model.
Kalandra Colony, Chikkaballapur – dignity for sanitation workers
On Bangalore’s peri-urban fringe, 105 informal-sector sanitation families lived outside municipal boundaries, lacking both sewers and toilets. BORDA brokered a compact: residents contributed labour, local engineers refined designs, and the town leased land for community toilets, an underground sewer network and a decentralised waste-water treatment system (DEWATS) that now irrigates adjoining parks. Because users collect and manage fees, the facility has run without external subsidies for three years, turning a once fetid storm-water ditch into a demonstration wetland.
Reviving a Karnataka step-well – women in the lead
In a drought-prone village a derelict step-well was restored with ferro-cement linings, bamboo check-dams upstream and a new social architecture downstream. Local women formed the “Jago” water committee, raised small levies to maintain the site, installed dustbins and began segregating solid waste. Inspired, the district administration has scaled the template to 18 gram panchayats across five taluks.
For Sai Prakash the moral is straightforward: “Any initiative may look small on paper, but if community trust is deep, its ripple is national.”
Finance and governance: re-imagining the public–private mix
The session also revisited an earlier BORDA-guided experiment—the 2017 public-private partnership (PPP) faecal-sludge treatment plant in Devanahalli. The local government leased land; a private operator built and runs the plant; septage transporters pay a tipping fee; and the municipality receives a share of revenue.
After six years the facility has treated 1.5 crore litres of sludge and, unusually for sanitation infrastructure, covers its own operating costs. The secret, Prakash said, was months of “tri-sector negotiations to get every clause—land lease, tariff, monitoring—hammered out before the first brick was laid.” The model, now cited in state policy, offers a template for small-town wastewater where capacity and coffers are both thin.
Questions from the floor: from ice stupas to rooftop tanks
During the question and answer session a student from Arunachal Pradesh wondered how to harness the Northeast’s deluge rather than watch it rush downstream. Varma’s response was disarmingly practical: start with rooftop rainwater harvesting—every 100 m² terrace is “a readymade water store,” its overflow directed either to tanks for lean months or to recharge pits under footpaths.
Another participant from Leh highlighted the use of “ice stupas,” conical winter ice reservoirs that melt gradually to extend summer supply. Such indigenous technologies, Varma said, deserve pride of place beside modern recharge pits because they “cost almost nothing and speak the language of local ecology.”
Water quality inevitably surfaced. Field teams under the Jal Jeevan Mission are now training women’s groups to use simple test-kits, separating first-flush roof run-off from potable storage and promoting low-cost bio-sand filters for arsenic and fluoride hot-spots.
Closing notes: the road from talk to transformation
As the clock ticked past the allotted ninety minutes, Varma offered a final reflection: India’s water trajectory will hinge on whether millions of “small” acts—digging a recharge trench, paying a toilet user fee, insulating a pipe—can add up faster than climate stress multiplies. For her, Jal Sanchay Jan Bhagidari’s next goal of two million structures is less a construction target than a behavioural one. “We have proved that people’s participation can build a million recharge pits; now we must prove that we can maintain them.”
The session thus ended where it began: with a call to turn policy into collective practice. If Keylong’s frozen pipes can run year-round, if sanitation workers can co-own a waste-water plant, and if a village step-well can become a women-led commons, then perhaps the distance between a “small town” and a “smart town” is exactly the width of a community’s resolve.