A political industrial ecology of water in Bodh Gaya, India: Pre- and Post-the World Heritage designation

Abstract

Bodh Gaya, a small agrarian town in Bihar, India, is renowned as the cradle of Buddhism. The Mahabodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2002. Every year, millions of visitors come here to quench their spiritual thirst. Consequently, the town is experiencing significant strain on its water resource capacity due to tourism and haphazard urbanization. Water metabolism of such small touristic and religious towns, along with the impact of tourists' water demand on urban water flows and infrastructure, remains largely unexplored. This study aims to evaluate water flows pre- and post-the designation of World Heritage status and examine tourism's impact on water resources and socio-economic inequalities in access to water supply infrastructure by using a political industrial ecology (PIE) approach. A complementary PIE approach, integrating the water mass balance equation with urban political ecology, is employed through methods such as document analysis and semi-structured interviews. The urban water metabolism of Bodh Gaya underwent a drastic transformation between 2001 and 2019 (pre- and post-the World Heritage designation). Direct tourist consumption increased approximately eightfold, rising from 92 to 730 million liters (ML), and groundwater extraction increased from 1586 to 4271 ML over the same period. The political ecology analysis reveals that residents struggle to access piped water due to precarious infrastructure, fragmented governance, and persistent social inequalities. To address water scarcity, the town has paradoxically shifted to a distant water source rather than leveraging available water in the urban system, such as stormwater and wastewater, to meet demand. Lastly, we recommend integrating tourists' water demands into broader urban planning for sustainable water management.