Introduction

India's water crisis has been widely covered in the international and national press. In the summer of 2019, the New York Times published a series of reports and features on the prospects of Chennai and other large Indian cities running out of water (Subramanian 2019). Data on the absolute scarcity of water, sometimes illustrated using dramatic satellite imageries of water bodies, often dominate discussions on India's water crisis (Sengupta 2019). Recall, for example, the 2019 report about 21 Indian cities running out of groundwater by 2020 (ANI 2019a). We are now well past the dreaded summer of 2020 but there has been no follow-up reportage. The argument that India's water crisis lingers because its effects are experienced unequally along multiple dimensions – caste, class, and gender – is hardly a controversial one for scholars. However, there has been very little discussion in both the international and domestic press of the gross inequalities in access to water. The New York Times report mentions the poor, while another describes how women sacrificed daily showers so that office-going male members of the family could afford the luxury instead (Denton and Sengupta 2019). An overwhelming focus on water scarcity instead of water inequalities, we argue, is one of the major causes for the perpetuation of India's water crisis. In this chapter, we seek to examine how the intersection of social inequalities and climate change contributes to water injustice.

In India, access to water is determined by a complex entwining of caste, class, and gender identities that work to perpetuate structural inequalities. While geography and the quality of physical infrastructure greatly influence the extent of water insecurity, they are not entirely responsible for it. In some parts of the country, safe drinking water is inaccessible, causing widespread suffering, illness, and disease. In other regions, cheap and state-subsidized access to water is taken for granted and easily abused (Fatah 2013). The army cantonment and government districts in Delhi receive 375 litres of water per capita per day. On the other hand, South Delhi's Sangam Vihar, an area with a large number of ‘unauthorized colonies’ and home to many lower-income religious minorities, receives a meagre 40 litres of municipal water per person.