What technical and institutional models will ensure the greatest possible access to water and sanitation services in Indian cities?

Summary Based on an in-depth study of the case of the city of Delhi in India, this work proposes to evaluate the relevance of a widespread hypothesis according to which water and sanitation services in developing cities will necessarily be organized - in the more or less long term - as a collective networked service, centralized at the city level, and managed by a single agency, as is the case in cities in industrialized countries. Taking into account the duality that characterizes today's developing cities and that opposes a formal city that is increasingly globalized to an informal city made up of illegal neighborhoods and slums, the question that is posed here is that of the future of a collective service that the most affluent can do without thanks to decentralized technologies and from which the most disadvantaged are excluded by legal barriers linked to the status of the habitat.