This essay builds on the labour of Pani Haq Samiti's Convener Forum, whose members' individual struggles are documented at panihaqsamiti.org/convener-forum,  and draws on that record throughout. Pravin Borkar, Purva Dewoolkar, and Sitaram Shelar wrote it, drawing on Sitaram Shelar's lecture "Thirst" (Manchester Museum, May 2026) and on discussions among the three of them held in Marathi and English.The lecture was supported by Purva Dewoolkar’s Bicentenary Fellowship research at the University of Manchester on water, sanitation governance and urban justice.

On 20th March 1927, at Mahad, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar and thousands of satyagrahis drank from the Chavdar lake. It was not that they lacked access to water, they drank to establish a claim that they were human and that water belongs to everyone.The municipality had opened the lake to them three years earlier, but savarnas kept the oppressed caste away regardless, saying their touch would pollute the water. After the satyagraha, the savarnas performed a ritual to purify it. The refusal was explicit: spoken in the vocabulary of ritual pollution, defended in the name of purity. 

Ninety-nine years later, the same exclusion operates in Mumbai’s water distribution system without the word caste appearing anywhere in it. The vocabulary has moved from touch to eligibility, tenure, cut-off dates  and procedure. The distribution of who is excluded has not moved with it. This essay shows that continuity as we have encountered them: sixteen years of forms, files, and papers that sit at the ward office for years before a signature, of getting our own licensed plumbers and pushing agencies for No Objection Certificates and of courtrooms, where in one hearing a Chief Justice opened by asking why anyone would want water for ‘illegal’ people. Across the seventy-four settlements Pani Haq Samiti (PHS) works in, water is managed through policies, pricing, pipelines and eligibility rules that never mention caste. The exclusion begins before the water does, in why most of these settlements exist at all, built upon cycles of drought and migration that are structured by caste. Caste shapes who gets counted, who pays what, who makes decisions, and what is deemed 'authorised.'

पूर्वी कधीतरी दुष्काळाच्या काळात पोटापाण्याचा प्रश्न सोडवण्यासाठी, जाती-पातीची माहेर असलेलं गाव सोडून शहरात आसरा शोधण्यासाठी… आपल्यासारखे ज्यांच्या पुढे-मागे कुणीच नसलेल्यांसोबत असलेलं बरं, या हिशोबाने वस्त्या अस्तित्वात येतात.¹

Under the Maharashtra Slum Areas Act of 1971, a census of slums was carried out in 1976, and photo-passes were issued; a pass brought protection from demolition, and with-it water, drainage and pathways. Then the date changed – an ordinance of 1995, re-enacted as an amendment in 1996, made 1 January 1995 the date on which a dwelling had to already exist. It was extended again to 2000, and structures built after that were made eligible only on payment. Each redrawing admits the people already inside and excludes again everyone who has arrived since.

This rule written in terms of land  (tenure, date, permission), lets the date that decides whether a house can be demolished also decide whether it can have a tap. Tenure is not a neutral inheritance, its links to the history of caste are well documented in urban studies (see Shaikh, 2021; Thatra, 2022). Around two million people in Mumbai were left without a legal water connection under this rule, most of them Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST),  and other oppressed caste, Muslim and migrant households – communities whose access to land tenure, and therefore to ‘eligibility,’ has been shaped by long histories of discrimination.

In 1999 the municipal corporation began exploring privatisation of the city's water distribution, and by 2006 a World Bank–funded consultancy, Castalia, was running a pilot in K-East ward under terms of reference that already specified the answer: a multinational private operator. Social activists, academics and citizens formed Mumbai Pani to track it, having noticed that the corporation was not party to the contract at all but sat in an advisory position on a service that was its sole responsibility. Reading the report line by line, the group found that Castalia had itself conceded that K-East's distribution was sufficient and that the ward's surplus went to other wards and had warned of contamination its own tests had not found. An elected representative asked for it to be debated in the house; the house declined. So, Mumbai Pani turned to the residents of K-East, the people the pilot would fall on, and that mobilisation became a wider campaign, the Pani Haq Abhiyan. At the third and last stakeholder meeting of the Water Distribution Improvement Project (WDIP), in November 2007, six activists (Sitaram among them) were arrested while protesting. The project ended abruptly. (Richa Bhardwaj's account sets out the sequence in full)

The third and final WDIP stakeholder meeting, reported the next day. (Times of India, Mumbai, 14 November 2007.)

What the corporation launched in its place was the Sujal Mumbai Abhiyan, and much of what went into it was Pani Haq Abhiyan’s demands: equitable distribution across the ward including the poorest, no sale of water or water assets, no retrenchment of staff, no tariff rise tied to the project, and private contractors held to work orders while the department kept financial and operational control. But the cut-off date survived in the proposal of prepaid meters for slum dwellers who could not show residence before 1 January 1995, on the reasoning that such households resort to illegal connections and water theft. 

That is what made the pre-1995 question central. In 2010 a city-level Pani Parishad brought together residents without that proof to speak about how they got water, and at that conference Pani Haq Samiti was established, with representatives from settlements alongside independent activists, academics and organisations working across Mumbai's vastis. Our 2011 Public Interest Litigation led the Bombay High Court, in 2014, to hold that access to water is a precondition of the right to life under Article 21. (A fuller account of this history, and of the campaign since, is at panihaqsamiti.org). The Bombay High Court directed the BMC to draft a ‘Water for All’ policy under Schedule 12 of the Constitution.

It took the BMC three years, around 2,000 residents marched to the municipal headquarters in 2016, carrying the water they were forced to drink, and submitting a memorandum asking the commissioner a simple question: would you give this water to your own child? That pressure, and the flood of applications filed alongside it, is what moved the BMC to formulate policy forward. The policy adopted in 2017, and its exclusions, read like a map of who the city has never quite decided how to count. Residents of coastal zone areas, of government and private land classified as non-tenable, of Railway land, of salt pan land, and of forest land (the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Aarey) require a No Objection Certificate from an authority under no obligation to respond. Each of these settlements maps closely onto where SC, ST, Adivasi and Muslim families have historically been pushed to live. Further, the policy was revised in 2022, but this time restricting eligibility for homeless and pavement dwellers, out of whom nationally, four in five belong to Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes or Other Backward Classes (IGSSS & OFFER, 2019). Implementation is the struggle that continues.

Residents present BMC's civic chief with a bottle of the water they had been drinking for forty years (Aparna Shukla, Mid-Day, 29 November 2016.)

That struggle is fought, in part, over a premise that does not hold: that there isn't enough water to go around. Mumbai draws from seven dams. Water researchers (Tiwale & Wagle, 2025) who have studied the network describe not scarcity but inequitable distribution: some households have received over 250 litres per person a day, while residents of our settlements survive on a fraction of that. The scarcity our settlements face was never about supply.

Ask an official why a settlement has no connection, and you will be given a hundred reasons, all of them procedural, none of them naming caste. These are the excuses as they are actually spoken to residents:

हि वस्ती बेकायदेशीर आहे, या झोपड्या अनधिकृत आहेत, तुम्ही सन २००० नंतरचे आहेत. तुमच्याकडे हा पुरावा नाही, तुम्हाला कायदेशीरच पाणी का पाहिजे? 

A June 2019 field report written by Sunil Yadav (PHS co-convenor) from Siddharth Nagar records the mechanism exactly: the ward's Deputy Hydraulic Engineer would not move the application further without a Collector's NOC and a CRZ NOC, two more approvals stacked onto a file that had already waited years. 

▶  जल अधिकार सत्याग्रह (Audio 1) Siddharth Nagar, Andheri, the same file, from inside it.

गलिच्छ वस्ती literally means ‘filthy settlement’, this is BMC’s own standing classification for these neighbourhoods, used in official correspondence and everyday bureaucratic speech. It describes who is presumed to live there, a purity-and-pollution notion is inscribed in the planning repertoire  In addition to the judgement written on the file, Siddharth Nagar is situated right in front of  a Middle - high income housing society whose residents have objected for years that the vasti spoils the look of their building, and who would sooner see it cleared than connected. 

▶  जल अधिकार सत्याग्रह (Audio 2) The building opposite, the road, the police, and what the officials did next.

The vocabulary adjusts to who lives there: where a settlement’s majority population is Muslim, the same system calls its residents Bangladeshi infiltrators. Where a settlement is SC/ST/oppressed caste, its residents are called thieves. Migrants who do not speak Marathi are called outsiders with no claim to the city at all. Only a small fraction of Mumbai was ever formally planned; the city has grown many times beyond that footprint since. So, who decides what is ‘formal’? Who decides what is ‘authorised’? In practice, the answer has always run along the lines of caste, religion, region, language and class. This is who gets counted as ‘unauthorised': people the caste order pushed out once already, arriving in the one place that would not ask where they came from. 

This exclusion also has a price, and it’s written in the tariff itself. The municipality charges residential building premises ₹6.36 per thousand and slum connections ₹4.76 for structures that existed before the cut-off. In addition, bottled water manufacturers pay ₹95.49 per thousand litres. On the other side of that date, with no legal connection, the residents buy from informal vendors at around ₹700 per thousand litres, a hundred and fifty times what a regularised building pays. Where legal connections do not reach, informal networks fill the gap through water intermediaries (water mafias), since scarcity itself becomes profitable once it is administratively manufactured. The corporation publishes its own defaulters list, and we found that the biggest water bill defaulters are government offices and large businesses, not the poor (check here defaulter lists). The households called thieves are the ones paying most, in cash, in advance. It is not that water cannot reach these settlements. It is that someone benefits, every day, from the fact that it does not.

PHS meeting with Hydraulic engineer, Mr Ashok S. Tawadia

Our relationship with the administration is complex. We are neither its friends nor its enemies. In the fight against privatisation, we found ourselves defending the very department we spend the rest of our time pressing to do better; its engineers, who plan distribution for one of Asia’s largest water systems, understand this city’s pipes in ways no private contractor would trouble to learn. We agitate against the department, and, when privatisation was the concern, we defended it. This is pragmatism that follows from the critique, rather than softening it. We are learning by doing and changing - a state department can be held accountable to Article 21, and a private company cannot be. Against this, we have spent sixteen years trying to change the system from within. “Educate, Agitate, Organise”, used as a method, not just a slogan. Communities learn how the system of water actually works: which office, which form, which official. The system survives on the assumption that people will not know how to ask. All of this is the work in which every application we file is documented, every rejection is documented, becoming an evidence base the people themselves hold and advocate from. 

Jaimati with the file of applications of Siddharth Nagar resident, at home, beneath a printed copy of the Preamble to the Constitution.

The narrative that justifies the exclusion is about who is counted as part of the city. Residents are described in these conversations as parasites, as people who draw on Mumbai without belonging to it, a claim that can only be made by denying the labour the city is built on, since the same residents clean its drains, carry its loads and raise its buildings, हे शहर त्यांना बहिष्कृत म्हणतं (the city calls them outcaste). बहिष्कृत, bahishkrut, is the word Dr Ambedkar gave his own newspaper a century ago. The city no longer uses it. Unauthorised, encroacher and non-tenable have replaced it. Through PHS’s work, change occurs slower than a policy. When Ismutara (PHS co-convenor), who has filed her own application, followed it through a ward office, has also organised others in her neighbourhood to do the same and made a tap arrive at her door, she does not afterwards describe herself as someone the city tolerates. She describes herself as someone it owes. That shift, from bahishkrut to rights-holder/entitled, is enabled by the Constitution. This is also why we are careful about what a connection means: one tap is a beginning, not an ending. It may not settle anything about tenure, or about the settlements still classified as ineligible, but it does change who is willing to go back to the ward office next time.

A tap connection being inaugurated in the settlement

In 1927, a community was told a lake would be polluted if they drank from it. In 2026, a family is told a file cannot move because their settlement NOC can't be obtained, or because they have no house to certify. Much has changed between those two sentences, India adopted a Constitution that abolished untouchability. Yet who is told to wait has stayed the same, only the vocabulary used to tell them has changed., which is why our struggle is carried in a phrase Abrar bhai gave us: इज्जत का पानी, water with dignity

The campaign went back to Mahad, 

 ▶  चवदार तळ्याला भेट  (Audio 3)  Mahad, where the campaign carried the water it had won and swore an oath about the settlements that have not.

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¹ this essay keeps some of its refusals as they were spoken in Marathi, in Hindi, untranslated. Some of it is not written down at all, further, we include audio notes that Pravin speaks as that has been the way we developed this article and has been the process of production of this essay.