Maharashtra has ordered all urban and rural local bodies to cut water supply by 10% from 16 October 2026, after one of the driest monsoons in years left roughly 265 talukas, nearly 74% of the state, declared drought-hit by early September.
The state’s water resources department has also announced dam-wise and usage-wise water planning through August 2027, and is pressing local bodies to reuse treated wastewater for gardening, construction and industry rather than drawing further on dwindling reserves. The order affects a state that includes Mumbai and Pune, India’s financial and technology hubs, both of which depend on water piped in from sources well beyond their boundaries; Mumbai draws supply from as far as 180 km away, through pipelines that in places are more than a century old.
Years of policy, little practice
Maharashtra has had rules requiring wastewater reuse since 2019, when its State Water Policy mandated a minimum 30% reuse rate in urban local bodies. A circular water economy policy approved by the state cabinet in October 2025 went further, mandating sewage and wastewater reuse across 424 urban local bodies and directing treated water toward thermal power plants, industry, non-potable urban use and irrigation; the Urban Development Department approved a 5 billion rupee budget (roughly $51.75 million, or about £39.1 million), focused on the largest water users. Yet an amicus note filed with the National Green Tribunal in April 2026 put the state’s wastewater generation at about 9,073 million litres a day, of which only 57% is treated, and a 2024 report by the Centre for Science and Environment found that just 17% of the state’s wastewater is actually reused.
The gap between policy and practice runs through weak institutions as much as weak infrastructure. A 2024 CEPT University study found overlapping responsibilities between the Maharashtra Water Resources Regulatory Authority and the State Pollution Control Board, delaying action against faulty treatment plants and polluters, while local bodies lack a secure funding source to operate and maintain sewage works they already have. Leakage losses across the state’s large cities run between 30% and 40%, with Mumbai’s non-revenue water, lost to physical leaks, distribution faults and theft combined, at 34%; some of the city’s pipelines are more than a century old, carrying water across a network built for a far smaller population than it now serves.
Much of what is lost never reaches a treatment plant in the first place. Utilities commonly estimate wastewater at 80% of the water they supply, a formula that misses the water drawn from borewells, delivered by private tankers, or otherwise never metered, meaning official treatment figures likely understate the true volume flowing untreated into drains and rivers. In the Pune Metropolitan Region, septic tank desludging tankers have reportedly dumped raw sewage directly into the Mula, Mutha and Pawana rivers, and illegal sludge dumping on the banks of the Nandini river in Nashik has also been reported.
The strain falls hardest on residents without piped connections. Slums cover 24% of Mumbai’s area and house roughly half its population, according to a 2026 Slum Rehabilitation Authority report, and even those with piped supply often report poor water quality and limited supply hours. Peri-urban areas around Pune and the Mumbai Metropolitan Region rely heavily on borewells and private tankers, deepening pressure on hard-rock aquifers in the Thane-Belapur corridor and around Pimpri-Chinchwad. Recommendations now circulating among water experts include shortening pipelines to cut losses, requiring large residential and institutional complexes to reuse treated water on-site, and clarifying which agency is actually accountable when a treatment plant fails, steps that have been proposed for years but have gained new urgency now that the shortfall has reached the taps of India’s most industrialised state. In Kerala’s Wayanad district, meanwhile, an unusually hot September is already straining paddy and coffee farms.
