Rahul Somvanshi
When water arrives through a household tap, it can feel almost free. That is the point wildlife conservationist Dr Anish Andheria made in a recent interview: urban consumers may pay only a few rupees for a thousand litres of municipal water while paying far more, litre for litre, for bottled water.
The comparison is not a national price for all of India. Water tariffs vary by city, consumer category and use. In Mumbai, reporting on proposed municipal tariff changes has cited residential charges reaching roughly ₹6 per thousand litres, while commercial rates are far higher. The larger point is that a water bill does not capture the full ecological cost of keeping a city supplied.
Water begins upstream
Municipal water systems depend on more than pipes, pumps and treatment plants. Rainfall has to be captured in a watershed; water needs to infiltrate soil, feed streams and reservoirs, and be stored through dry periods. Forests, grasslands, wetlands and healthy soils are part of that infrastructure.
Forest cover does not create rainfall on command, and every forest has the same hydrological effect neither. The outcome depends on the landscape, rainfall, soil, vegetation and how water is managed. But intact catchments can reduce erosion, improve water quality, slow runoff and help regulate flows. When catchments are degraded, utilities and communities can face higher costs for sediment removal, treatment, flood control and water scarcity.
Andheria has argued that many Indian rivers—especially beyond the Himalayan system—depend substantially on rainfall over forested landscapes. That is why protecting forests is not only a wildlife issue. It is also a water-security issue for farms, towns and cities downstream.
Why price matters, and why price alone is not the answer
Low household tariffs can support affordability, which matters in a country where water access is unequal. Raising prices indiscriminately would not automatically make water governance fairer. But very low prices, leaks, weak metering and inadequate investment can obscure the cost of extraction, treatment, pumping and the ecosystems that make water available.
A better approach is not simply “make water expensive.” It is to protect a basic affordable supply while using fair, transparent tariffs for higher consumption and commercial use; reduce distribution losses; meter where appropriate; reuse treated wastewater; protect catchments; and publish clear information on where a city’s water comes from and what it costs to provide safely.
A bottle is not the benchmark
The bottled-water comparison is rhetorically powerful but imperfect. Packaged water includes bottling, packaging, transport, retail and branding costs; municipal water is a public service delivered at scale. The important contrast is not that tap water should cost as much as a bottle. It is that a cheap bill should not be mistaken for a cheap resource.
India’s water future will be shaped as much by upstream land use as by infrastructure in the city. A reservoir, a treatment plant and a pipe network are visible assets. The forests, soils and wetlands that help sustain them are easier to overlook—until water becomes scarce or dirty.
This article draws on Dr Anish Andheria’s interview clip and reporting on Mumbai water tariffs. The ₹6 illustration is treated as Mumbai-specific context, not a nationwide water price.
