Tankers over taps: Flood-prone Guwahati now buys water by the litre

At dawn, before the traffic thickens and balconies fill with morning chatter, another routine unfolds across Guwahati's residential neighbourhoods. Residents wake up not to an alarm, but to an anxiety - will the taps run today?

In scores of the city's rapidly expanding apartment blocks, the first act of the morning is not breakfast but a check of the overhead tank. Every two to three days, the vigil begins again. WhatsApp groups light up with the same question passed from floor to floor, "Has the tanker arrived?"

In Hatigaon, Six Mile, VIP Road, Beltola, Panjabari, and New Guwahati, water tankers have become as indispensable as electricity.

The irony cuts deep. Guwahati receives some of the heaviest rainfall in the country, year after year. Yet thousands of families in one of the Northeast's fastest-growing cities now purchase water by the litre, budgeting for it the way they once budgeted for groceries.

Infrastructure without supply

For years, Guwahati's apartment boom leaned heavily on groundwater. As the city expanded aggressively, borewells became the easiest solution to weak public water infrastructure. One apartment after another drilled into the earth, often deeper than the last.

With water scarcity growing, residents increasingly turn to borewells in search of a reliable supply (Representative Image- @MssoSilk / X)

In Panjabari, resident Manashi Bhuyan remembers when her apartment's borewell first struck water at around 1,000 feet. That did not last. "Within three to four years, the groundwater ran dry. We had to drill another 500 feet before we could get water again," she said.

In Hatigaon, Bristi Gogoi says a significant portion of her household expenses disappears into securing something as basic as water.

"Every month, we spend anywhere between Rs 2,000 to Rs 6,000 only on water. We have to buy tanker water every three days, and even then the suppliers come according to their own convenience," she said.

Her frustration deepens because the infrastructure already exists outside her home. "The JICA connection has been installed, but water still hasn't started coming," she added.

That sentence captures the contradiction many Guwahati residents now live with - pipelines without supply, infrastructure without delivery, promises without timelines.

The unequal geography of water

Not every neighbourhood is struggling equally. In Tarun Nagar, the arrival of JICA-assisted drinking water supply in 2023 brought dramatic relief for residents like Manoj Kumar Nath.

"Since the JICA supply started, we have stopped buying water completely," he said.

A JICA water supply network expansion work in Guwahati (Photo - @gmdwsb/ X)

Unlike many others across the city, Nath's family now relies primarily on piped supply, keeping tube well water only as an emergency backup.

"The water quality is mostly clean now. Earlier, muddy water used to appear sometimes, but now it happens very rarely," he added.

He also described a system that, at least in his locality, appears responsive. "We once had a pipeline blockage issue. After a few complaints, it was fixed within a week or two. The authorities responded properly," he said.

But Tarun Nagar's experience also highlights a larger inequality unfolding across the city: access to reliable water increasingly depends on where one lives.

A few kilometres away, entire neighbourhoods remain excluded from the same network.

In New Guwahati, residents say the long-promised piped water project feels incomplete and out of reach. Hemanta Goswami says pipeline work in his locality stalled before reaching residential lanes.

"We were told two years ago that connections could not be provided because of lack of funds and pending work," he said.

According to him, only portions of the larger network appear functional. "We heard the main pipelines reached areas like Noonmati and Jyotinagar, but the inner lanes were left uncovered," he said.

Meanwhile, residents continue paying heavily. "In our building, seven families together purchase 7,000 litres of water every three days for around Rs 1,200. Apart from that, every household buys extra water individually because each flat has separate tanks," Goswami said.

For middle-class apartment residents, water has become a recurring financial liability.

The cost of unplanned urbanisation

Environmentalists have repeatedly warned that Guwahati's natural groundwater recharge systems are collapsing under urban pressure. Wetlands that once absorbed and stored rainwater are shrinking. Hills are being levelled for real estate projects.

Open green spaces are rapidly turning into concrete surfaces that prevent rainwater from seeping back into the ground.

Constructed buildings on the sidelines of the Deepor Beel wetland in Guwahati (Photo - @RanjanjyotiSar4 / X)

Yet construction approvals continue, and entire apartment complexes are coming up in areas where long-term water sustainability remains uncertain. The result is a city extracting water faster than nature can replenish it.

“Water percolation is no longer happening at the required rate. Earlier, there were more open spaces through which rainwater could seep into the ground naturally, but now most of those areas have been covered with concrete structures. Because of this, seepage has reduced drastically,” said environmentalist Narayan Sarma.

Guwahati's water crisis is not merely an infrastructure issue; it is increasingly a planning failure. The city expanded vertically before strengthening its water systems horizontally.

Officials weigh in

Officials associated with the Guwahati Jal Board acknowledge that extending the city's water supply network has faced multiple hurdles.

A Jal Board official said flyovers, dense construction zones, and difficult hilly terrain have slowed pipeline expansion in several areas.

"In some places we cannot lay pipelines because of ongoing infrastructure work and terrain challenges. We also had to redo faulty work done earlier by another agency," the official said, requesting anonymity.

According to the official, Guwahati's overall water supply programme spans four zones, namely North Guwahati, South Central, South East, and South West, funded through different agencies including JICA, ADB, and the central government.

Authorities say nearly 70,000 households are currently covered under parts of the network, while tenders for western zones have already been floated.

"The North Guwahati and South Central projects are targeted for completion by December 2026. Once all phases become fully operational, we aim to bring the entire city under the network within the next three to four years," the official added.

But for residents already paying thousands each month for water, future deadlines offer limited comfort.

A warning sign

The real danger is that Guwahati's water crisis remains largely invisible. Unlike floods, it does not arrive dramatically overnight. It creeps in through deeper borewells, rising tanker bills, unfinished pipelines, and dwindling underground reserves.

And while the city continues to grow upward with new apartment towers, the systems sustaining that growth are struggling to keep pace.

An image of a rainwater harvesting borewell (Photo - @emesarx / X)

For now, many residents are managing by storing water carefully, budgeting for tanker deliveries, and drilling deeper borewells.

But beneath the surface, Guwahati is sending a warning. “The issue in Guwahati today is that there is too much water during rains, but most of it flows directly into drains without any percolation. Apartment societies and builders should adopt water harvesting measures seriously," Sarma concluded.