India’s urban rainwater harvesting trend: problems, possibilities, and provocations

Abstract: 

Urban India needs water—a lot of it. Cities such as New Delhi have typically met internal demands by increasing the amount of water that is channeled into the national capital from far away places. This has led to the creation of large upstream dams and to numerous inter-state water transfers. As the sustainability of these water sources is in doubt, and as the demands for water grow, the call of the day is to implement decentralised technologies that improve water availability. Within such a scenario of water management shifts, this talk takes an anthropological look at the emerging trend of urban rainwater harvesting. While promising, the effort to catch rain where it falls is rather complex in everyday practice due to a range of cultural, social and political factors. By exploring these challenges while inviting audience reflections on similar concerns and efforts in Bangalore, the talk addresses issues pertinent to the quest for improved water stewardship in ever transforming Indian cities.

About the speaker

Georgina Drew is a Senior Lecturer of Anthropology and Development Studies in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Her research interests include the anthropology of water, religion and ecology, the cultural politics of development and climate change, and feminist political ecology. She is the author of River Dialogues: Hindu Faith and the Political Ecology of Dams on the Sacred Ganga (2017, University of Arizona Press). Her work, funded by organizations such as the National Science Foundation and the Fulbright-Hays Program, is also featured in American Anthropologist (2012), the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture (2012, 2015), Himalaya (2014, 2016), South Asia (2014, 2017), The Australian Journal of Anthropology (2014), and many more. In 2015, Drew was awarded a prestigious three-year Discovery Early Career Researcher Award through the Australian Research Council to study sustainable urban water transitions in South Asia.