Second only to Africa, Asia is experiencing the fastest urban growth in the world. The continent is home to 60% of the world’s megacities – including Jakarta, Dhaka, Beijing, Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, to name a few. As the level of urbanization is already high in the major hubs, most urban growth is unfolding in the periphery of the urban administration, which is also in the periphery of the rural areas, called the peri-urban areas.
The peri-urban areas are becoming like smaller hubs with a population of one million or less and closely linked to the adjoining metropolis. These peri-urban areas are transformed by the urban sprawl, rural-urban migration and natural population increase. Some metropolises even have a number of peri-urban settlements pertaining to the interdependency on the highways and economic activities with neighbouring cities such as, Gurgaon, Noida, Faridabad, Ghaziabad are closely linked to Delhi to the extent that people living there perceive and believe they are living in Delhi due to their work-residency locations and connectivity.
The peri-urban areas are growing in leaps and bounds becoming a landing and happening place for many urban aspirants creating a landscape defined by opportunities. In the mixture of rural and urban areas a new set of social, economic and environmental changes and challenges are also emerging such as water security and conflict but also the rooms for cooperation.
The Friday.Waters Book Review session organized by WforW Foundation took on a discussion on these aspects through a review of the book, “Water Security, Conflict and Cooperation in Peri-Urban South Asia.” The speaker of the session and reviewer of the book was Professor Sumit Vij from Wageningen University. Sumit has a chapter contribution in the edited book by Vishal Narain and Dik Roth and published by Springer Nature in 2022. Using qualitative research and an ethnographic approach, Sumit’s research focuses on the questions of power in peri-urban areas, water and climate politics, and power interplay between state and non-state actors. Prof Vishal Narain, an inter-disciplinary water researcher from Management Development Institute Gurgaon, served as the session discussant. Vishal’s research work cuts across water governance, rights, gender, equity and institutions in water management and environmental change in peri-urban areas. The session was moderated by Dr. Mansee Bal Bhargava from the house of WforW.
The session “Water Security, Conflict and Cooperation in Peri-Urban South Asia” reflects on the institutional structure of peri-urban areas transformed by urban expansion. The session video is available here. This essay is developed as a learning outcome from the book and the session and highlights the arguments and research outputs from the speaker, the discussant and their peers.
The Book In Brief
The open access book makes an important contribution to the state of water management in South Asia with focus on India, Bangladesh and Nepal. The 192 pages and 9 chapters in the book have contributions from 24 authors including the editors. The multi-trans-disciplinarity nature of the book draws from a wide range of professional backgrounds from the South and the North.
The focus on water security in the rapidly growing peri-urban spaces in the global south provides in-depth insights on how changes in water security are locally experienced and acted upon by various actors besides the costs and the benefits ascribed to the changes. The empirical investigations and descriptive accounts address the theory-practice dichotomy in the emerging scholarship of peri-urban governance and management.
The book seeks to address the following questions: How does urbanization change access to water in peri-urban contexts? What are the implications of these processes for institutions and practices around water, especially for forms of conflict and cooperation? What kinds of approaches are needed to contribute to the analysis and improvement of water security in peri-urban contexts and reconcile competing interests and claims?
Chapter 1. The Emerging Scholarship of Peri-Urban: Why is This So Crucial? By Vishal Narain, Dik Roth. Besides introducing the book and the other chapters, the highlight of the chapter is on the patterns of deprivation for resource-dependent peri-urban and rural communities, as well as increasingly severe environmental problems, such as the over-extraction of groundwater and water pollution. It introduces two contrasting views — ecological modernization and political ecology in the context of water security.
Chapter 2. A New Imagination for Waste and Water in India’s Peri-Urban Interface. By Seema Mundoli, C. S. Dechamma, Madhureema Auddy, Abhiri Sanfui, Harini Nagendra. The chapter looks into the complex linkages between water and waste in the peri-urban interface of Bengaluru and Kolkata through two water systems, Kannuru lake and Kolkata’s wetlands respectively.
Chapter 3. From Royal Canal to Neglected Canal? Changing Use and Management of a Traditional Canal Irrigation System in Peri-Urban Kathmandu Valley. By Anushiya Shrestha, Dik Roth, Saroj Yakami. The chapter discusses the changing uses and management of a traditional canal irrigation system namely, rajkulo (royal canal) amidst the urbanization in Kathmandu Valley in Nepal.
Chapter 4. Public Lives, Private Water: Female Ready-Made Garment Factory Workers in Peri-Urban Bangladesh. By Deepa Joshi, Sadika Haque, Kamrun Nahar, Shahinur Tania, Jasber Singh, Tina Wallace. The chapter applies a political economy lens to draw attention to the paradoxical situation of the increasingly “public” lives of poor Bangladeshi women working in industries in situations of increasingly “private” and appropriated water sources in institutionally liminal peri-urban spaces.
Chapter 5. Digging Deeper: Deep Wells, Bore-Wells and Water Tankers in Peri-Urban Hyderabad. By Nathaniel Dylan Lim, Diganta Das. The chapter uses an ethnographic study to dive into the everyday experiences of water insecurity in the peri-urban areas of the global hub of high-tech and information technology industries in Hyderabad.
Chapter 6. Changing Agriculture and Climate Variability in Peri-Urban Gurugram, India. By Pratik Mishra, Sumit Vij. The chapter highlights the changing dynamics of agriculture in Budhera, a peri-urban case where the triple crises (economic, ecological and existential) come to the fore.
Chapter 7. Views from the Sluice Gate: Water Insecurity, Conflict and Cooperation in Peri-Urban Khulna, Bangladesh. By M. Shah Alam Khan, Rezaur Rahman, Nusrat Jahan Tarin, Sheikh Nazmul Huda, A. T. M. Zakir Hossain. The chapter elaborates on the conflict and cooperation around water infrastructure in relation to the contestations over water and land in peri-urban Khulna, Bangladesh.
Chapter 8. Interventions to Strengthen Institutional Capacity for Peri-Urban Water Management in South Asia. By Sharlene L. Gomes. The chapter focuses on the ways in which institutional arrangements influence issues of water insecurity, conflicts, and crises. It demonstrates ways to intervene in the institutional context of water resources through two approaches, the Participatory Institutional Analysis and the Transformative Pathways.
Chapter 9. Concluding Reflections: Towards Alternative Peri-Urban Futures? By Dik Roth, Vishal Narain. Besides summarizing the chapters’ contributions, the chapter suggests correction on the selective state apathy towards the peri-urban and advocates that the messy and transitory nature of peri-urban spaces requires engagements across a wide spectrum of actors beyond the state before prescribing “policy reforms”.
Neither Urban nor Rural: The Case for Dedicated Peri-urban Scholarship
In the Global South, the traditional rural-urban dichotomy is no longer a distinct border; it is blurred. As cities expand, they develop an urban metabolism that consumes surrounding rural landscapes, leaving behind hard infrastructure and a heavy ecological footprint. Managing this transition is exceptionally difficult because peri-urban areas do not fit into neat, administratively defined territories. They exist with little to no governance, where neither urban nor rural administrations are equipped to keep pace with the rapid changes affecting residents and their land.
As most peri-urban growth happened unplanned in the beginning, most of these areas are established as towns with their municipal administration and other infrastructures slowly taking shape. In this transitional zone, the depletion of common-pool resources such as water, wetlands, forests – occurs just as rapidly as the infrastructure that precedes it. The concept of “common blindness” applies, referring to how planners take essential resources like water and land for granted and forget the impacts of urban expansion. Consequently, the protection of the commons is rarely factored into the formal expansion of cities.
The speed of growth of the peri-urban formation often outpaces the ability of any institution to react, leaving these areas ungoverned by formal regulations. This is precisely why a new scholarship on peri-urban is necessary: to inform policymaking and institutions about these emerging settlements. The book highlights and warns against the binary “urban vs rural” especially in administration, services, and infrastructure. Such thinking reproduces policies and interventions that create an illusion of order and near-perfect management and importantly, the peri-urban remains unaddressed in administrative directorates and delineations.
Instead, peri-urban areas are best understood as evolving places where lack of formal governance makes way for “DIY (Do It Yourself) urbanism” – a blend of unwritten customs, informal laws and survival strategies. In this environment, public institutions are often unable to guarantee even the most basic necessities, most notably water security.
Case Study: Water Security In Peri-urban Gurugram, India
To understand the problem of water security in peri-urban areas, one cannot isolate environmental processes from the social and political contexts in which they exist. For example, while water is theoretically a public good, it has become a private commodity in all cities and their peripheries. As populations surge, the competition for water and land intensifies, triggering re-allocation, conflict and contestation between social classes, genders and ethnic groups. In this landscape, migrant farmers are most disadvantaged, as employers and landlords hold the vast majority of the bargaining power.
This trend is illustrated by the transformation of Budhera, a peri-urban village bordering Gurugram City (southwest of New Delhi) in the district of Haryana. Budhera is located near the Dwarka Expressway and commonly referred to as a large rapidly developing village and recognized for the Budhera Water Treatment Plant. Budhera hosts major water canals and a large water treatment plant designed to serve the urban center. This infrastructure alongside rapid urbanization has significantly disrupted the local landscape. For landless households, the pasture lands, forests, and wetlands are essential for their livelihoods. However, these are rapidly declining as land is commodified to accommodate population growth, agriculture and private markets.
Climate change further exacerbates this scarcity of water. Vij highlighted that the region has transformed from four seasons to only three seasons. In Budhera, high rainfall variability has driven up the costs of accessing groundwater for irrigation. This has effectively pushed marginalized communities out of their own land, replacing them with those who are affluent enough to afford digging deeper tubewells to access that water. In other instances, delayed winters and prolonged heatwaves cause winter crops to miss critical rainfall. The weather unpredictability has pushed farming into a haphazard guess, with no viable future for the next generation.
Consequently, agriculture has become an increasingly risky, low-revenue venture. Many young people are abandoning the fields of Budhera to take their chances of getting better jobs in more and near vibrant urban areas like Gurugram. What was once a path to sustaining a family is now seen as a losing gamble, leaving the peri-urban landscape in a state of constant social and economic flux.
Discussion and Way Forward
For all the analytical depth that peri-urban research offers, it often falls short of creating the systemic change that is needed to protect the livelihoods of residents and their land threatened by urban expansion, climate change and politics. Vij and Narain emphasize that the research needs to step out of its comfort zone beyond simply co-creation and confront the institutional and political issues. Because peri-urban areas receive so little dedicated attention in science and policy, the first step remains rigorous ethnographic work. This includes diving deeper into largely informal rules, customs, laws, policies, class groups, and gender dynamics that make up peri-urban areas. It is equally important to move beyond the silos and have collaborations between academics, NGOs, governments and community members to let the conversations on the subject emerge and reach the mainstream.
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*Hirwa Hans Harelimana is an urban economist and storyteller working at the intersection of community experiences and citywide solutions. With a background in development economics and international studies, he focuses on how people living in cities adapt, build, and imagine better housing and public spaces. He blogs on Substack at: https://developmentworks.substack.com.
Dr Mansee Bal Bhargava is an entrepreneur, researcher, educator, speaker, and mentor. More about her is at: https://mansee.in.
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