Water governance in peri-urban areas

The article highlights the critical challenges of water and sanitation in India's peri-urban areas, a 'missing middle' between rural and urban classifications. These zones suffer from institutional limbo, leading to inadequate water supply, contaminated groundwater from waste dumps, and poor sanitation practices like illegal septage dumping. The article proposes five actions: resolving the governance vacuum by constituting Nagar Panchayats as per the 74th Constitutional Amendment, securing drinking water sources, launching a Swachh Bharat Mission 3.0 focused on peri-urban sanitation and faecal sludge management, scaling up decentralised wastewater treatment technologies, and financing peri-urban water as strategic infrastructure.