India has made good progress toward meeting basic standards of access to safe drinking water, but improved planning methods are needed to prioritize different levels and types of water service needs for public investment. This paper presents a planning approach for collecting, analyzing, and mapping drinking water service data at the village, block, and district levels in Pune district, Maharashtra, India. The planning approach created a mobile application for data collection by gram sevaks at the village level. It employed ranking methods developed with district officers to prioritize villages with the greatest needs, cluster analysis to distinguish different types of needs, and geographic information system (GIS) mapping to visualize the spatial distribution of those needs. This analysis shows that there are high levels of spatial heterogeneity in water services within, as well as between, blocks but also that there are broad patterns of priorities for planning and policy purposes. These priorities include water service needs in the Western Ghats, a combination of water source and service needs in dissected plateau lands, source strengthening in the eastern plains, and local hot spots in peri-urban areas. Based on this Pune district case study, the Government of Maharashtra is testing the approach in five additional districts.

Sustainable rural drinking water is a widespread aim in India, and globally, from the household to district, state, and national scales. Sustainability issues in the rural drinking water sector range from increasing water demand to declining groundwater levels, premature deterioration of village schemes and services, inadequate revenues for operations and maintenance, weak capacity of water operators, frequently changing state and national policies, and destabilizing effects of climate change. This paper focuses on the special role of district-scale drinking water planning, which operates at the intersection between bottom-up water demand and top-down water programs. After surveying the challenges associated with bottom-up and top-down planning approaches, we present recent efforts to strengthen district and block drinking water planning in the state of Maharashtra. A combination of district interviews, institutional history, village surveys, GIS visualization, and planning workshops were used to advance district planning goals and methods. Results assess bottom-up processes of water demand; top-down water programs and finance; and intermediate-level planning at the district and block scales. Discussion focuses on potential improvements in district planning methods in Maharashtra.

Improving rural drinking water services at the village level is a high priority in India. The National Rural Drinking Water Program (NRDWP) calls for village drinking water plans on an annual basis. However, planning data analysis and mapping are complicated by the different levels of local settlement that are involved. The aims of this paper are: first, to review how the term ‘village’ has come to refer to three different types of settlement for planning purposes in India; second, to show how each settlement type has different water data and Geographic Information System (GIS) map coverage; and third, to identify practical strategies for using these different data and mapping resources to develop rural drinking water plans. We address the first objective through a brief historical review of local government administration and drinking water database development in India. Challenges of data analysis and mapping are demonstrated through a case study of Pune district in Maharashtra. This challenge led to the identification of six practical strategies for coordinating the analysis of drinking water data and GIS mapping for planning purposes.

India has a long history of policies that aim to improve rural drinking water services, in part through decentralization that faces deeply rooted institutional challenges. These include debates about: the duty of the state to provide rural drinking water supply; tension over the role of central, state, and local governments; and frequent changes in policy and senior public officials that disrupt long-term implementation. Some water governance theorists have described policymaking in this context as a pragmatic process of bricolage, that is, of piecing together practical opportunities for improvement where possible. This paper takes a macrohistorical geographic approach to these institutional problems, with an emphasis on northern India. It shows that ancient sources dating back to the Arthashastra have underscored the role of the state in developing water supplies for the people. Subsequent regimes have argued for various combinations of centralized and local responsibility. We show that frequent rotation of senior public officials was systematized in the 16 th century Mughal empire. Changing roles of India's five levels of center, state, district, block, and village government have a half-millennium-long history, evolving through dramatically different Mughal, Mahratta, colonial, and post-colonial contexts. Devolution policies were frequently changed in the colonial period. Independence in