Insights From Solinas
By Rahul RaviKumar, Team Solinas
India continues to grow towards its dream of soon $5 trillion economy. While that growth puts us in the forefront for many races, it’s also resulting in us lagging behind in a few. Water and sewer networks are finding it hard to keep pace with urban development.
Across India’s cities, construction activity is adding new buildings faster than utilities can update their records. In 2024 alone, 4.13 lakh new housing units were launched across the seven largest urban centres.
Each residence is a yet another new connection and complication in the already labyrinthine existing water and sewer networks. Water distribution mains face higher draw at specific nodes. Sewer lines may or may not have to deal with additional inflow, at times at levels or gradients they were not originally engineered to handle. Contractors have to extend laterals or create connections to nearby lines where access is possible. These localised adjustments, repeated many times, create small shifts in pressure, load, and geometry that accumulate over time.
But the records that are used to track these changes more often than not lag behind the actual rate of growth. As a result, maintenance teams rely more on field familiarity, which works only until personnel or neighbourhood layouts change.
How Digital Mapping Changes the Picture
What Nagpur did last year is a good example of the benefits that emerge when this information gap is closed.
In 2024, the Nagpur Smart and Sustainable City Development Corporation completed digital mapping of its entire sewer network across 38 administrative zones. Around 3,200 km of sewer lines and more than 1.7 lakh manholes were mapped, updating records that previously covered roughly half that length. This massive spike in visibility led to:
– Faster maintenance: Crews could now locate blockages or defects at the household level and plan excavation with precision.
– Coordinated public works: Road and utility projects use the same base map, reducing the risk of damaging existing lines.
– Continuous updating: Repairs and expansions are logged monthly, keeping the map aligned with ground reality.
Digital mapping is key for urban local bodies to have a verified benchmark for their networks, one that connects construction, maintenance, and planning through consistent spatial data. For Indian cities, which continue to add new buildings with each passing year, this clarity is essential for ensuring that enclosed WASH infrastructure is one step ahead of growth instead of being one step behind it.
Reference: “Smart City Corporation maps exact length of sewer line,” The Times of India, January 30, 2024. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/nagpur/smart-city-corporation-maps-exact-length-of-sewer-line-web/articleshow/106621875.cms