A small improvement: small cities lag in expanding household water coverage across urban India

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Abstract This paper investigates how progress towards meeting the sustainable development goal of providing universal and equitable access to drinking water for all is distributed across the spectrum of urban settlements. The study measures how urban local governments (N = 3,547) in a rapidly urbanizing country, India, have increased their coverage of water supply to households between 2001 and 2011. I use theories on multilevel governance of urban services to develop a multilevel linear regression to model the city- and state-level factors associated with growth in water supply coverage. The results show that 68% of cities and towns have recorded water coverage growth, but the extent of this progress is unequally distributed across cities in different states and between cities of different sizes. Small cities and towns, which house over two-thirds of India's urban population, have recorded significantly lower water coverage growth rates as have cities in low-income states. These findings suggest that policies for urban water infrastructure development should focus on smaller cities and towns if we are to achieve spatial equity in access to water for all in an increasingly urban world.