India is building 700 million square feet a year. Residential towers, IT parks, logistics hubs, gated communities on the outskirts of cities that didn’t exist a decade ago. It’s a lot of concrete going up fast.
What mostly doesn’t make it onto the drawing board is water. Not as a services line item, but as something a building should be actually designed around.
Most projects still handle water the same way they did twenty years ago. Municipal connection in, sewage out, a sump somewhere in the basement, maybe a borewell as backup. The assumption built into thousands of projects right now is that water will arrive from somewhere else. That someone else’s pipes will carry the load. That scarcity is a municipal problem, not a design problem.
That assumption keeps getting tested. Chennai ran dry. Bengaluru’s lakes have been shrinking for years. Borewells across new Hyderabad layouts pull up water with TDS levels that need treatment before it touches anything. The cities with the fastest construction pipelines are often sitting on the most stressed groundwater. The buildings going up in those cities are still being designed as if this isn’t their problem.
It’s not really a technology gap. Rainwater harvesting systems exist and aren’t complicated. Greywater recycling works. Low-flow fixtures are cheap now. The problem is earlier — whether water gets factored in at the concept stage, before the structural decisions close off the options.
You can retrofit a lot of things. Façades, MEP systems, solar panels. Changing how a building fundamentally handles water after the slab is poured is expensive and usually incomplete. The decisions that shape happen early, on drawings, before most consultants are even in the room.
Architects are in that room. Not the people who specify taps later — the people deciding how a building sits on a site, where drainage goes, whether there’s even space for a treatment system.
700 million square feet a year. A lot of those buildings will still be standing in 2075. Whether the people in them have reliable access to water will partly depend on decisions being made right now, mostly without water on the agenda.
That’s worth sitting with.
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