The villages of Sultanpur and Jhanjhrola Khera are located about 15 kms away from Gurgaon city in the North-West Indian state of Haryana. Urbanization and climate change have together altered water access
and security in these villages
This paper describes the intervention strategy to improve water security in these two periurban villages. Most approaches to improving natural resource management in periurban contexts focus on mobilising the community; little attention is paid to reorienting the state or strengthening the user-bureaucracy interface. This paper describes the process that was followed to reorient civic agencies engaged in the provisioning of water and to break what is popularly called the ‘anarchy syndrome’ in water management. The paper argues that for periurban areas that suffer from lack of institutional cover and weak responsiveness of service providers, providing platforms for direct engagement between water users and service providers can be a key tool for improving water security. It can build community resilience in the face of climate change and urbanization, both of which threaten periurban water security: the key is not just to augment water supply physically or technologically, but to build the community’s capacity to ask for better water supply and to negotiate better with service providers.