Informal water suppliers meeting water needs in the peri-urban areas of Mumbai, India

This paper is based on fieldwork on the small-scale water providers in the peri-urban areas of Mumbai. It tries to explain why small-scale water providers have appeared there, what type of service they provide and why they have succeeded, where the municipalities have failed. The objective is to examine to what extent small-scale water providers activities are sustainable and wheter they constitute a temporary or a permanent phenomenon in these territories ; to examine whether we are heading towards new forms of urban governance, where informal actors no longer compete with each other, but cooperate with public utilities and emerge as an extension of the public utility.