Holding a leaking Hyderabad together: Inside the life of the city’s plumber

Across Indian cities, water travels long distances before it ever reaches a tap. In Hyderabad, a city of over ten million spread across 650 square kilometres, water is drawn from faraway rivers such as the Krishna, Godavari, and Manjeera. It flows through hundreds of kilometres of pipelines before entering the city’s dense network of underground pipes, valves, and pumps. The capital city of Telangana currently receives around 550 million gallons per day (MGD), though daily demand is estimated at over 650 MGD. 

The Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply & Sewerage Board (HMWS&SB), founded in November 1989 according to the Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Act 1989 (Act No. 15 of 1989), is tasked with the planning, design, construction, upkeep, operation, and oversight of the city's piped water supply derived from  the three rivers. On paper, this appears like a well-engineered system, managed by parastatal water boards. To orchestrate the distribution of this vital resource across the fifth-largest metropolitan city in India, the HMWS&SB categorises people and infrastructure into sixteen divisions. These divisions are further dissected into sub-sections, aligning with clusters of serviced neighbourhoods. 

In reality, water is unpredictable: supply schedules, pressure, and leaks vary across time and place. Managing these fluctuations depends on people at the last mile. While the city’s water linesmen maintain valves and pipelines across divisions, cities are full of individuals who operate closer to households, tweaking lines, improvising connections, and doing the legwork in the built environment that ensures taps actually run—sometimes to the quiet annoyance of official actors. Khaled was one such person.

A Name Written On The Walls

By early morning, 24-year-old Khaled would already be at work. Most days began in a state-built housing complex called Singareni Colony, a resettlement housing complex on Hyderabad’s southeastern edge. His name wasn’t on any city roster, but his name was scrawled on staircases, doorways, and walls. That was how people knew who  to call for plumbing services. Residents called him when ceilings dripped, floors flooded, or pipes hissed. With a bag of tools, scraps of pipe, and a knack for improvisation, he held together a water system that the city had long abandoned.

As the one-room tenements stirred awake to the day’s supply of water and the whirr of ceiling fans trying to push out the damp smell that had seeped into the walls overnight, Khaled would be out responding to calls.

Sometimes he would be crouched besides an overflowing drain or inspecting a cracked pipe. Other times, residents would point him towards flooded thresholds or ask him to set up new "collections"—a local shorthand for water that technically reached the neighbourhood but didn’t enter the tenement until Khaled figured out how to tweak the lines.

Life In Singareni Colony

Singareni Colony was built in 2005 to resettle families who lost their homes in a fire. Dozens of such colonies exist in Hyderabad under schemes like the Valmiki Ambedkar Awas Yojana (VAMBAY) and the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), whose maintenance and repair often become occasional electoral promises, as evidenced by the Telangana government's allocation of ₹100 crore in 2023 for the renovation of these houses.

These colonies were intended to provide permanent housing for low-income families, but many began to deteriorate soon after construction.  This is not the condition of a single enclave but part of a wider pattern. As Prasad Shetty, founder and teacher at the School of Environment and Architecture (SEA), argues, what is produced in the name of housing is often real estate rather than homes for the poor.

He points out that the state gradually moved away from housing to focus on large infrastructure projects, and even when it does intervene, it tends to generate new distortions. A long-standing tendency in Indian cities has been to provide housing without the accompanying infrastructure—most starkly a reliable water supply, along with sanitation networks, schools, hospitals and public transport—making the promise of housing fundamentally incomplete. 

Unsurprisingly, residents call Singareni a lawaris basti—an “orphaned settlement” that nobody cares for. Water comes every other day, often for less than an hour. Families scramble to store what they can, clean up the overflow, or wait for Khaled to intervene. Shahana Begum (42), a resident of the colony recalls that around a decade ago, rooftop tanks were removed by the municipal corporation, citing concerns that the buildings could not bear their weight. With no overhead storage, households were forced to draw direct connections from the main supply line into their homes.

The fallout of these arrangements is deeply gendered. When rooftop tanks are removed and water comes directly through pipes, it becomes unregulated and unstoried. What flows into the house isn’t just water—it is dampness that seeps into kitchens, walls, bedding, and routines. Carers, mostly women, are left to mop, air, and rearrange spaces made unliveable by moisture they cannot predict or pause. As Krupa, a young woman studying nursing, shared, ‘The difficulty here is not just the unreliability of water, but the fact that when it comes, we do not know how to deal with its excess. Where do we drain it out?’’ 

Learning Outside The Classroom And To Hold A System Together

Khaled grew up here in Singareni Colony. His mother was among the original allottees. At 17, he started learning plumbing and apprenticed under Rajanna, a contractor working in Hyderabad’s expanding suburbs. He took him along to construction projects in rapidly growing areas such as Hayat Nagar, Uppal, LB Nagar, and Bandlaguda.

These were places where the city was expanding along the Outer Ring Road and highway corridors. Khaled’s training happened on rooftops and construction sites. He learned to assemble fittings, test connections, and adapt to unpredictable conditions.

In Singareni, he tuned into how materials responded, how homes aged, and what families needed. He knew where valves jammed, which lines bent, and which ceilings had begun to crack. Without proper drainage or pressure control, even a short supply cycle could lead to waterlogging in already-cramped rooms. 

So, he took to improvising compact storage units from market fittings by sourcing prototypes from hardware markets and adapting them using fittings assembled through an informal network of mentors and suppliers in the Old City.He trained other young men in the colony, many without formal education or steady work.

Together they created a small team cutting, resizing, and installing tanks to fit household needs. Some joined through word of mouth; others because they had seen his work.  Fees were shared equally with small bonuses for whoever brought in the next job. He became the one residents turned to not only to fix leaks but to make their homes liveable.

Repair, Maintenance, And The Value Of Care

So, what exactly was Khaled doing? Was it repair or maintenance? Conventionally, "repair" refers to fixing what is broken, while "maintenance" is the ongoing care that prevents breakdowns. But in a place like Singareni, the distinction blurs. Khaled’s work lived in that in-between space—not simply responding to failures but holding things together long enough to delay the next breakdown, as water seeped through walls and beams and tinkered with the structure of the buildings. 

Across India, plumbing is taught in Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs), and institutions like the Central Tool Room and Training Centre in Odisha produce certified plumbers. But many, like Khaled, learn outside these systems through apprenticeships, trial and error, and place-based problem-solving. Their knowledge isn’t certified, but it is valuable. It’s shaped by real-time constraints: low water pressure, ageing pipes, improvised fittings, and fragile buildings. That this working knowledge remains unrecognised says less about the workers than about how narrowly policy defines skill. It overlooks the depth of learning that comes from working with what’s broken—and making it work.

Though some older plumbers dismissed Khaled as inexperienced or reckless, and perhaps some of his techniques did warrant scrutiny, what set him apart was his ability to intervene in a place otherwise left to decay. Khaled’s choices also showed care. He refused to install electric motors, knowing the extra pressure would burst ageing pipes and damage the already weak buildings. On the face of it, he was just installing a few small tanks. But those fittings quietly rewired the entire logic of water in the building. What once ran wild—corroding beams, flooding corridors, making mopeds skid—was now held, directed, and claimed. A seemingly minor fix cut wastage, lowered everyday hazards, and, more importantly, carved out pockets of control and dignity inside homes.

Maintenance As A Civic Strategy And Repair As Infrastructure, Not Patchwork

Khaled’s story is not unique. Across Hyderabad and in many Indian cities, there are countless workers like him. They are not on official payrolls, but they hold together leaking colonies, layouts, and informal settlements.

In homes where there was barely enough room for a bed and stove, better water regulation opened up new ways to organise space. Some residents converted spill-prone corners into makeshift toilet areas, raising platforms, adding partitions, and reinforcing fittings. These modest changes often lasted longer than the temporary toilets originally provided. Plumbing, in this context, became the groundwork for privacy, hygiene, and dignity.

As drains clog, pipes leak and residents are left without much control over how they engage with an essential service and resource such as water; the politics of water in Indian cities is not just about extraction from rivers or the expansion of infrastructure.

It is about the everyday flows, blockages, and breakdowns that define life for millions. Repair and maintenance are not secondary. They are at the heart of what water governance must become. It must also recognise the everyday acts of repair and maintenance that shape how people actually experience water.

If we are serious about resilient cities, we must think programmatically, recognising repair not as emergency patchwork but as infrastructure in its own right, deserving of investment, training, continuity, and care.  Platforms like Urban Company may count over a lakh of home service providers. But much of this work remains transactional, unprotected, and detached from communities. If these skills already exist, why can’t we owe something better to those who hold up our cities? Why not integrate them into the public fabric? An urban employment guarantee scheme that funds neighbourhood repair teams, values informal apprenticeships, and creates long-term public roles would bolster city-wide maintenance cycles and dignity for those already doing the work. This is not an impossible task. It is about backing what is already there while recognising that actors like Khaled are at the frontline of how we use water and energy and are also indicative of how we live as households, individuals and a working population. 

There is also a wider urgency. India’s affordable housing stock is already limited. When tenements like those in Singareni are left to decay, the deficit only widens. Maintenance, therefore, must be seen not as a technical afterthought but as a civic strategy. It requires fair pay, safety equipment, stable employment, and platforms to share knowledge. Above all, it calls for a shift in how we assign value—not to what is newly built, but to those who keep it from falling apart.

Khaled is no longer with us. He passed away in an accident shortly after this story was written. His contribution continues to be remembered in the community he served. This article honours his life and labour and the dignity he brought to a leaking city.