Field Note 10 of 22

Warangal, Telangana

“A city of over a million people, and the water still doesn't come.”

Warangal crossed a million residents years ago. It has the scale, the density, the economic activity of a serious Indian city.

What it doesn't reliably have is water. Supply is intermittent — residents plan their days, and sometimes their weeks, around when it will actually arrive. Sewage treatment covers a fraction of what the city now generates. Flooding returns most monsoons, in roughly the same low-lying stretches, year after year.

None of this is new information to anyone who lives there. It's simply the backdrop — the thing everyone has adjusted their lives around, the way you adjust to weather.

A decade of rapid growth, and the basic services underneath it never quite caught up.

Field Note 10