Who Pays Twice for Water in Indias Informal Settlements
- BerryBeat Team
- 1 day ago
- 12 min read
A family in an informal settlement should not have to swipe, tap, queue, and pay every morning for the most basic public good. Yet across India’s urban edges, that is exactly what many families do. The queue at the water ATM has become so routine that a broken right now looks like a functioning service.
In October 2024, researchers surveyed 260 residents in two informal settlements in Ghaziabad about access to potable water. At first, most residents said they faced no major challenge. That answer should have sounded like good news. It was not.
On further probing, researchers found that “access” meant a water ATM, a vending machine that dispenses purified water for a fee. Most residents, many of them migrant workers, saw the machine as the solution. According to an EPW study published in August 2026, low-income households earning below Rs 25,000 per month were spending Rs 10 to Rs 20 for 20 litres of drinking water daily, often for a family of five or six.
The astonishing part is not only the price. It is the normalisation.
If residents no longer describe paid water as a hardship, it means the city has successfully lowered expectations. The state did not provide a pipe. A private machine arrived. The machine took coins, cards, or prepaid credits. The family adjusted.
That adjustment is now being mistaken for success.
The water ATM is a symptom of municipal failure
Water ATMs are often described in friendly language. They are “safe”, “purified”, “community-based”, “low-cost”, and “technology-enabled”. Some claims may be true in narrow ways. A machine can dispense cleaner water than a contaminated handpump. Reverse osmosis and UV filtration can reduce certain risks. A vending point can be closer than a distant tanker.
But the larger question is different.
Why is a household in a city paying at a machine for water that the municipal system should supply through pipes?
Across India’s informal urban peripheries, the pattern repeats. Municipal water supply is absent, irregular, or politically conditional in thousands of unauthorised colonies, JJ clusters, resettlement colonies, and slums. Residents rely on tankers, borewells, handpumps, informal vendors, neighbours’ connections, public standposts, and now water ATMs.
A water ATM fills a gap, but the gap itself is the story.
When cities fail to lay pipes, do not regularise connections, refuse to recognise settlements, or supply water only once every few days, private operators step in. They do not step into an empty market. They step into a public failure.
That is why Water ATM India slums privatisation 2025 2026, India water access informal settlements municipal failure, Rs 5 10 per 20 litres water ATM India, Delhi water contractors political connections, Bombay High Court water slums prepaid card ruling, India right to water Article 21 Supreme Court is not just a clumsy search phrase. It captures a real chain of events: unreliable public supply, private vending, political patronage, prepaid access, and a right that becomes conditional at the point of use.
The machine is not neutral. It changes the meaning of access.
A piped connection gives households a claim on the city. A vending machine gives them a transaction. The first arrangement says water is a public service. The second says water is available if you can pay today.
That distinction matters most for families living on daily wages. Rs 10 or Rs 20 may sound small from a middle-class distance. For a household earning under Rs 25,000 a month, recurring daily payments cut into food, transport, school expenses, medicines, phone recharges, rent, and debt repayments. The cost is not only cash. It is also time spent queuing, carrying, rationing, and negotiating.
A city that makes poor households pay by the litre is not solving scarcity. It is pricing survival.
How paid water becomes normal in settlements
The Ghaziabad finding is powerful because it reveals something deeper than shortage. Residents initially said they had no challenge accessing potable water. Only later did it become clear that their “no challenge” meant they could buy water from a vending machine.
This is how deprivation becomes normal.
When people live for years with irregular supply, they stop comparing their reality with a universal right. They compare it with yesterday’s difficulty. If the tanker used to come at midnight, a water ATM that works in the morning feels better. If the handpump was contaminated, filtered water for Rs 10 feels safer. If local officials ignored complaints, a machine with a caretaker feels more reliable.
The benchmark shifts from entitlement to coping.
That shift can be especially strong among migrant workers. Many live with weak documentation, insecure housing, fear of eviction, and limited access to local political networks. They may not expect the city to serve them fully. They may also hesitate to complain, because complaint can invite questions about land, tenure, identity papers, or “eligibility”.
So when a paid system appears, it can feel practical. It does not require a household to win a political fight. It does not require a formal connection. It does not require the settlement to be treated as permanent. It simply asks for money.
That is exactly the problem.
Prepaid or pay-per-use water makes access appear efficient while hiding unequal citizenship. The resident becomes a customer, but not a rights-bearing urban resident. The machine becomes proof that something has been done, while the pipe remains absent.
This arrangement also creates a strange kind of gratitude. A community that receives a paid vending point may be expected to feel lucky, even when the public system has failed. The question becomes, “Is the machine working?” rather than “Why is there no household-level municipal supply?”
When paying for water no longer feels like a problem, the city has already won the argument it should have lost.
The language of “solution” also masks the burden of quantity.
A family of five or six cannot live on 20 litres a day. That amount may cover drinking and some cooking, not bathing, washing, cleaning, menstrual hygiene, sanitation needs, or the extra needs of children, elderly people, pregnant persons, and sick family members. If purified water is priced per 20 litres, households must decide what deserves “safe” water and what can be handled with unsafe or less reliable sources.
That is a cruel choice, and it rarely appears in official success stories.
The private operator arrives where the public pipe does not
The water ATM model varies by city, but the broad mechanism is familiar. A public agency or urban local body does not provide reliable piped supply in an informal settlement. A private operator, non-profit partner, contractor, or hybrid entity installs a purification unit or vending machine. The source may be groundwater, tanker water, or a local supply line. The water is treated, dispensed, and sold.
In Bengaluru, companies have signed memoranda with the BBMP, sunk borewells in slum areas, purified the water through RO and UV filtration, and sold it at around Rs 5 to Rs 10 per 20 litres. That sounds inexpensive only if the municipal alternative is ignored. In a regularised neighbourhood, residents do not line up daily to buy every 20 litres of drinking water from a vending point. They expect pipes, storage, pressure, and accountability.
The unfairness is not only that poor households pay. It is that they pay under worse terms.
A formal piped water user can complain about billing, supply timings, pressure, contamination, or service interruptions through recognised channels. The channels may be imperfect, but they exist. In informal settlements, residents often face a maze. The municipality may point to land status. The contractor may point to the contract. The machine operator may point to electricity problems, filter replacement, or borewell yield. The elected representative may intervene selectively.
Accountability becomes scattered.
Private systems can also create new local power centres. In Delhi, a government study documented that water-supplying contractors “have the patronage of the local mafia and politicians.” That sentence deserves public attention because it names what many residents already know. Water scarcity is not only a technical issue. It is also a political economy.
Where municipal supply is weak, control over water becomes control over votes, rents, loyalty, and fear. Tanker routes, timings, vendor access, standpost locations, borewell permissions, and prepaid cards can all become instruments of local power. A resident who questions the price or supply may not be dealing with a faceless market. They may be dealing with a contractor linked to neighbourhood strongmen or political actors.
This is why water privatisation in informal settlements cannot be discussed as a simple “public versus private” debate. The reality is more tangled. A machine may be installed through a public agreement, run by a private vendor, protected by local political interests, and used by residents who have no better option.
That mix allows each actor to claim partial innocence.
The municipality can say a facility exists. The operator can say it provides purified water. The politician can say the community demanded it. The court can say a prepaid mechanism improves access. The resident still pays.
A useful test is simple: would the same model be acceptable in a middle-class authorised colony as the primary source of daily drinking water?
If the answer is no, then it should not be acceptable as the default for low-income settlements.
The law recognises water, but the pipe still stops at tenure
India does not lack legal language on water rights. UN Resolution 64/292, adopted in 2010, recognises access to clean water and sanitation as a human right. India’s Supreme Court has also read water as part of the right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution.
This should be a strong foundation. In practice, access often gets filtered through land tenure.
Informal settlements are treated as temporary, unauthorised, encroached, pending, disputed, or “not eligible” for full services. The result is a cruel contradiction. People are permanent enough to work in the city, build its housing, cook its food, clean its streets, staff its shops, deliver its goods, and pay indirect taxes. But they are often treated as too temporary for a secure water connection.
This is where the rights framework collides with planning practice.
If water is a component of Article 21, it cannot depend entirely on whether a household has perfect land papers. Basic services should not be used as a reward for formal tenure. Nor should denial of services become a backdoor punishment for poverty, migration, caste location, rental informality, or failure of the state to plan affordable housing.
The Bombay High Court’s ruling on water supply in slum settlements, where it endorsed a prepaid card mechanism, sits inside this tension. A prepaid system may look administratively neat. It can track usage, reduce non-payment, and provide a controlled way to deliver water without recognising full tenure claims. One law activist described the ruling as raising critical questions about how fundamental rights are determined on the basis of land tenure.
That concern is serious.
A prepaid card can provide access, but it can also condition a right. If the card has no balance, what happens to the right? If the vending point fails, who is liable? If the settlement is considered unauthorised, does the municipality still carry a duty to supply enough safe water? If a child needs clean water tonight, should the answer depend on a recharge?
Legal recognition means little if the everyday interface is a payment slot.
The question is not whether every service must be free in all circumstances. Cities already use tariffs, cross-subsidies, public standposts, community toilets, and lifeline supply models. The question is whether the poorest households should face the harshest form of metering, where every small unit of drinking water is bought before use.
A rights-based system would begin with minimum assured supply. It would treat safe water as a floor, not a commodity ladder. It would separate water access from eviction politics. It would make agencies answerable for quality, quantity, affordability, and continuity.
Legal discussion here is informational, not legal advice. But the principle is clear enough for public debate: a right that stops at the boundary of an informal settlement is not being treated as a right.
The community pays twice
The sharpest line in this story is also the simplest: the community pays twice.
Once in taxes. Once at the tap.
This point needs careful reading. Many residents of informal settlements may not pay property tax directly in the way a formal homeowner does. Some are tenants. Some live in settlements without recognised addresses. Some pay rent to informal landlords. But they still contribute to public revenue in many ways: through GST on everyday goods, user charges, transport costs, local fees, labour that sustains the urban economy, and rents that often absorb hidden costs of informality.
They are not outside the economy. They are inside it, at the hardest end.
Then, after contributing to the city, they pay again because the city does not return a basic service. In some cases, the municipal corporation that failed to lay the pipe awards the water ATM contract to the company that bills the same residents at Rs 10 per bucket or can. That is not a neutral service model. It is a transfer of risk and cost downward.
The city avoids the capital and political work of universal piped supply. The private or contracted operator gains a captive customer base. The resident absorbs the daily expense.
This is not just a household budget issue. It changes urban democracy.
When public services become paid coping systems, claims weaken. A resident does not demand a right. They manage a balance. They do not ask why the ward lacks infrastructure. They ask whether the machine will open today. The political imagination shrinks to the size of a 20-litre can.
That is why water ATMs can be dangerous even when they are useful. They can reduce immediate distress and deepen long-term inequality at the same time.
The better policy question is not, “Should all water ATMs be removed?” That would be too easy and, in many places, harmful. If a machine is the only source of safer drinking water in an area, shutting it down without an alternative would punish residents. The real question is, “What must be true for a water ATM to be temporary, accountable, affordable, and rights-compatible?”
At minimum, cities should treat paid vending as an emergency or transitional measure, not a permanent substitute for municipal supply. That means they must publish clear data and responsibilities.
A rights-compliant approach would ask:
Which settlements still lack piped water, and why?
Which agency is responsible for each unserved area?
Which contracts govern water ATMs, tankers, borewells, and purification units?
What is the price per 20 litres, and who approved it?
Is there a free or subsidised lifeline quantity for low-income households?
Who tests the water quality, and how often are results made public?
What happens when machines break, cards fail, or supply stops?
What is the timeline for replacing paid vending with common or household-level municipal supply?
These are not radical questions. They are basic governance questions.
If an urban local body can map parking, property tax zones, advertisement hoardings, and road works, it can map water denial. If it can sign contracts for vending machines, it can disclose those contracts. If it can collect money from poor households at the point of water access, it can design a system where no family is denied safe drinking water because they lack Rs 10 that morning.
What a fairer water system would look like
A fairer water system in informal settlements does not begin with charity. It begins with recognition.
Residents need to be recognised as urban residents with service rights, regardless of whether the settlement’s land status is unresolved. This does not require cities to settle every ownership dispute overnight. It requires them to stop using tenure as an excuse to deny basic life-support services.
The next step is a lifeline standard. Every household should have access to a minimum quantity of safe water at no or very low cost, with special attention to drinking, cooking, hygiene, and sanitation needs. Pricing beyond that minimum can be debated, but the floor should be protected.
Cities also need to move away from opaque contractor dependence. If private operators are used, the terms must be public. Contracts should state the source of water, treatment method, price, maintenance duties, grievance process, water testing schedule, and exit plan. An operator should not become the permanent face of a missing municipality.
Quality monitoring must be independent and visible. A machine labelled “RO” or “UV” should not be trusted only because the label exists. Residents need access to recent test results in simple formats, displayed at the point of supply and available through ward offices or local bodies. Water safety should not depend on faith in a box.
Community participation also matters, but it must not become unpaid management of state failure. Resident committees can help track supply, report breakdowns, and monitor unfair pricing. They should not be forced to carry the burden of ensuring a right that public agencies are paid to provide.
Most of all, water planning must be tied to housing and migration realities. Informal settlements are not accidents at the edge of the city. They are part of how Indian cities run. Migrant workers, sanitation workers, construction workers, domestic workers, vendors, drivers, factory workers, and care workers cannot be treated as temporary bodies with permanent labour value.
If the city needs their work, the city must plan for their water.
The pipe is the real test of urban justice
Water ATMs are often presented as proof that the city is doing something. Sometimes they are. But doing something is not the same as doing justice.
A machine that sells purified water in a settlement without pipes may reduce immediate harm. It may even save families from unsafe sources. But it should also make us angry, because it marks the point where a public right has been converted into a retail routine.
The Ghaziabad survey offers a warning that cities should take seriously. When people say they face no challenge because they can pay daily for water, the crisis has not disappeared. It has been absorbed into household discipline. Families have adjusted their budgets, their mornings, their expectations, and their idea of what they can demand.
That is not resilience. That is resignation dressed up as access.
India’s urban future cannot be built on prepaid rights for the poor and piped comfort for everyone else. The constitutional promise of life with dignity cannot be delivered through a vending slot alone. If water is part of Article 21, then the test is not whether a resident can buy 20 litres today. The test is whether the city accepts an unconditional duty to provide safe, affordable, reliable water where people actually live.
The community already pays for the city with its labour, taxes, rent, and patience. It should not have to pay again each morning for the water that public systems failed to deliver.
The answer to who pays twice is clear. The harder question is why Indian cities still allow it.
