'Contextualizing Rural-Urban Water Conflicts: Biophysical and Socio-Institutional Issues of Domestic Water Scarcity'

This chapter provides conceptual approaches of the physical sciences to describe issues concerning physical resource shortage, and socio-institutional analysis to describe the systemic causes of domestic water scarcity. It presents the case of the town of Bailhongal, located in the Malaprabha reservoir catchment, in the northern regions of semi-arid Karnataka, India. The chapter begins with an assessment of the physical resources and elaborates on the various bio-physical factors in the town that add up to felt water shortage in the town and the conflict situation at the catchment and local scales. Urban population in India will reach around 40 percent of the country's population by 2020, and by 2025, more than 50 percent of the population will live in cities and towns. The land-use change scenario analysis in the study addressed two different change patterns increasing trends in irrigation from rain-fed cultivation, reversing trends of irrigated area conversion to rain-fed cultivation.