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Embedding Equity in Urban Climate Resilience: Rethinking Service Delivery in Indian Cities

Ankit Jha, Soham Shah, Gaurav Sahni, Vishwas Chitale
October 2025 | Climate Resilience

Suggested Citation: A. Jha, S. Shah, G.Sahni and V. Chitale. 2025. "Embedding equity in urban climate resilience: Rethinking service delivery in Indian cities." SHELTER, HUDCO-HSMI Publication, Vol. 26(2): 34–44.

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Overview

This paper examines how climate change is transforming episodic urban hazards into systemic service failures across Indian cities. Using Mumbai as a case study, it explores how climate-induced hazards like floods, heatwaves, and storms intersect with inequitable service delivery, outdated infrastructure, and centralised governance to deepen socio-spatial inequalities. By integrating the IPCC’s hazard-exposure-vulnerability framework with climate justice and political economy lenses, the authors argue for an equity-first approach to resilience planning, one that prioritises redistributive measures, decentralised governance, and participatory decision-making to strengthen adaptive capacity, especially for informal settlements and vulnerable groups.

Key Highlights

Systemic Risks: Climate extremes in Indian cities are evolving into prolonged service failures (water, power, sanitation), disproportionately affecting informal and low-income communities.
Service Inequities: In Mumbai, slum residents receive only 45 litres of water per person per day versus 135 litres for non-slum residents, reflecting deep-seated infrastructural inequities.
Governance Gaps: Despite the 74th Constitutional Amendment, climate governance in India remains highly centralised, with overlapping mandates among urban agencies hampering local adaptation.
Equity Lens: Resilience is not only a technical challenge but also a question of distributive, procedural, and recognitional justice determining who benefits from adaptation and who bears the costs.

Key Recommendations

Urban policies and development plans should explicitly assess and monitor equity outcomes using disaggregated indicators (income, gender, age, occupation). Mandate multi-hazard and social vulnerability assessments for all major city plans. Develop and apply tools like the Social Vulnerability Index (SoVI) at ward or neighbourhood scales. Use these insights to guide targeted infrastructure and adaptation investments.
Empowering local governance systems is central to delivering decentralised and context-sensitive climate action. Building resilience depends on devolving authority and resources to ward-level institutions that can respond more effectively to localised risks. Institutionalising participatory planning and budgeting processes would enable communities especially women, youth, and informal workers to voice their needs and shape priorities. Dedicated local funds for adaptation, service continuity and asset maintenance combined with clearer coordination between municipal and state agencies, would help address the current fragmentation of urban governance.
Prioritise resilient and inclusive infrastructure as a pathway to climate justice. Investments should focus on upgrading and decentralising essential services like water supply, sanitation, energy, and housing in informal settlements which face the greatest exposure to climate hazards. Resilient systems such as neighbourhood-level water tanks, microgrids, and nature-based drainage networks can help ensure continuity during crises. These infrastructure measures must be paired with adaptive social protection policies particularly for informal workers and low-income groups in order to strengthen their capacity to withstand and recover from climate shocks.

“Equity cannot be an afterthought of service delivery, it must be the starting point of resilience. Only by centering the needs of the most vulnerable can we ensure that no one is left behind when climate shocks strike.”