For Naina Ram, water is money. When he couldn’t get enough, business would suffer at his small grocery store in Pali, a hardscrabble industrial city in India’s largest and driest state.
He either had to buy water from tankers or wait for hours at community taps. Tanker water was expensive, he recalls, standing outside his corner store at Baba Ramdev residential colony, a new settlement for slum-dwellers.
“It wasn’t good quality, but we had to drink it. We’d get sick. If I went to the tap I had to close my shop for a couple of hours.”
Rajasthan is a desert state, and its harsh, dry climate exacerbates the impact of a lack of basic services in its cities. Many are without piped water connections, toilet and wastewater treatment facilities, roads that don’t flood during the rainy season, and health services to treat a booming population.
The infrastructure deficit makes poverty often more severe in cities than in rural areas, as many urban poor live in unsafe, unhygienic, and cramped slums and informal settlements. Though poverty is falling, an estimated 10.7% of people in Rajasthan’s cities live below the poverty line. Their lives can be precarious; many lack ownership rights to their dwellings and face ejection without warning. Personal safety is a constant concern.
India’s cities have driven the country’s thriving economy, with growth expected to reach 7.3% this fiscal year, according to ADB estimates. But the poor condition of urban infrastructure in Rajasthan causes it to miss out on some of these gains. Moreover, a quarter of the state’s population are city dwellers, and this is rising by nearly 3% a year— putting extra strain on services.
