Presentation short abstract

Ghaziabad shows how treating groundwater as “invisible” creates governance blind spots. Combining spatial analytics and stakeholder insights, we connect groundwater decline to sprawl, private borewells and fragmented regulation, arguing for integrated, just futures.

Presentation long abstract

Ghaziabad, an integral part of India’s national Capital Region, has become a frontline where rapid urbanization meets the hidden politics of groundwater. Ghaziabad’s groundwater crisis reveals how cities are governed through what is made visible—and what is kept unseen. This paper argues that water insecurity is not only a biophysical outcome of urbanization but also a governance effect of surface/groundwater silos that fragment responsibility, knowledge, and regulation. Analysis shows a rise in built-up area, alongside a decline in surface water bodies, and a reduction in cultivated land over two decades. Sprawl driven by edge extension and high-rise clusters has disrupted recharge pathways and intensified runoff. Depth-to-water trends indicate groundwater decline, highlighting a widening gap between urban growth and hydrological renewal.

Combining spatial analysis, hydrological modelling, and stakeholder engagement, the paper traces how groundwater knowledge is produced, authorized, and contested across state monitoring, planning rationalities, extraction practices, and community experience. Interviews with officials, planners, private providers, RWAs, and peri-urban residents show how the subterranean is rendered administratively “invisible,” enabling unregulated borewell expansion and shifting risk onto informal settlements and peri-urban spaces. The paper also shows how real-estate-led and industrial development normalize groundwater dependence, reshaping power over urban waters and deepening uneven exposure to depletion and pollution.

By making socio-technical links between surface and groundwater empirically legible, this paper contributes to efforts to trouble radical separations in governance and to imagine integrated, just urban water futures that foreground recharge protection, accountable regulation of extraction, and plural forms of water knowledge.