Cities account for just 2% of the planet’s surface area, yet they are home to half of the world’s population. The concentration of people and the increasing rate of urbanization place cities squarely in the center of the global water management challenge. Cities today account for 60% of all water allocated for domestic human use.With political power and money concentrated in the metropolitan areas, governments face growing pressures to reallocate water from other sectors (most notably agriculture) to meet growing urban demands.
The challenge of urban water management is multifaceted, it includes a lack of freshwater sources within feasible proximity to sustain water demand in many cities. The population density and intensity of economic uses of urban water also lead to water quality degradation that is often most critical in urban settings.

Many urban areas have come to rely on groundwater as their primary source for various reasons, because of degraded water quality, intermittent supply, and the typically higher cost of surface water. This puts enormous pressure on groundwater resources. In fact, nearly one-third of the global population relies on groundwater as the source of drinking water. However, aquifer depletion rates, falling groundwater levels and heavy water pollution threaten to foreclose this option for many cities. The urban water supply and sanitation sector in this country is suffering from inadequate levels of service, increasing demand-supply gap, quality deterioration, poor sanitary conditions and deteriorating financial and technical performance.

Hydrologists have carefully plotted the water equation. The amount of fresh water on the planet is finite - less than a million cubic kilometers. That was enough in 1700, when less than a billion people shared the planet, and in 1900, when some 2 billion people were alive. Now, there are more than 6 billion people and the freshwater supply is stretched to its limit. By 2025, the same amount of water must feed an additional 3 billion people. The populations of water-short countries are estimated to be 550 million, and expected to increase one billion in the next few years. Water shortages will adversely affect agriculture, which takes 70-80 percent of all available fresh water in the world.

The consequences of increasing global water scarcity will largely be felt in the arid and semi-arid areas, coastal regions and in the mega cities of the developing world. Water scientists predict that many of these cities are or will be unable to provide safe and clean water and adequate sanitation facilities for their citizens, which are two fundamental requirements for human well being and dignity.

India has over 300 million city-dwellers. Experts predict that this number will rise even further and by 2020, about 50 percent of India's population will be living in the urban regions. This will put more pressure on the already strained centralized water supply systems in the urban areas.

In this background, the National Conference on Urban Water Management: Challenges and options has been organized at Bangalore.