While allowing great real estate profits, Mumbai’s market liberalization reforms failed to address the low income housing shortage, causing the growth of slums which are now home to nearly half of Mumbai’s residents. The marketization of land rights led to the improvised construction of unplanned buildings, causing a mismatch between the over ground landscape and the deteriorating underground water infrastructure. In 1995, an electoral promise established a cutoff date which determines slums’ eligibility to rehabilitation schemes. Settlements built after this cutoff date are “unauthorized” and deprived of legal connections to the municipal water supply. While access to municipal water in most Mumbai slums is inadequate in terms of reliability, quality and quantity, the situation is worse for these unauthorized neighborhoods which represent nearly half of Mumbai’s slums. With little access to water through legal connections, slum dwellers turn to the informal sector for their daily supply, and have to pay up to 15% of their income on water which is often contaminated.

According to a joint study by the World Health Organization and UNICEF published in 2009, some 386,600 children die in India every year of diarrhea, with contaminated water being the main source of contamination. Considering the public sector’s failure in providing sufficient access to clean water to millions of slum dwellers willing to pay for better service, this report argues that the private sector can contribute to providing sustainable solutions for decentralized distribution models and household level purification systems, while contributing to the adoption of hygiene practices through social marketing.