Tourism Drank the Groundwater: Mapping Water Flows in Bodh Gaya Before and After…

Where This Came From

My fieldwork in Bodh Gaya started with ethnography — sitting with people, walking neighbourhoods, watching women queue at hand-pumps in the pre-dawn dark. But at some point I kept hitting the same wall: I could describe what I saw, but I couldn't quantify it. How much water was the town actually using? How much of that surge was directly caused by tourism? And how had any of this changed since the Mahabodhi Temple got its UNESCO World Heritage designation in 2002?

Those questions needed a different method.

This paper — published with my co-author Jian Pu in the Journal of Industrial Ecology — is the result of trying to answer them. We used a political industrial ecology (PIE) approach, which is a framework I'd been circling for a while and finally had a concrete reason to commit to. The short version: PIE lets you count the water flows and ask who controls them and who loses out. Most urban water studies do one or the other. PIE tries to do both at the same time.

This post is the human version — the version with the context, the methodological choices, and the findings that I still think about.

The paper is published as "A political industrial ecology of water in Bodh Gaya, India: Pre- and Post-the World Heritage designation" in Journal of Industrial Ecology, 2025, if you want the full thing.

Why Bodh Gaya Is an Unusual Case

Bodh Gaya is where the Buddha got enlightened under the Bodhi tree, around 500 BCE. In Buddhism, it's described as the navel of the earth. In terms of global religious tourism, it's one of the most significant sites on the planet — visited by pilgrims from Japan, Korea, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Tibet, and dozens of other countries every year.

Before 2002, it was a small agrarian town of around 30,000 people, with about 25 monasteries and six hotels. After the UNESCO designation, something shifted. Tourist numbers grew from around 200,000 a year to over 2 million by 2023 — a tenfold increase in two decades. More than 150 hotels and monasteries now operate there. Built-up area doubled between 2001 and 2019, from 13% to 30% of total land use, while agricultural land shrank by 15%.

None of that development was planned with water in mind. That's the problem this paper tries to get at.

What PIE Actually Is

I want to explain the framework properly because it's not intuitive from the name.

Industrial ecology, at its core, is about tracking material and energy flows through systems — cities, industrial zones, supply chains. Urban metabolism is a version of this applied to cities: you model a city as a metabolic system, with inputs (water, energy, food) and outputs (waste, runoff, emissions). The water mass balance equation we used, first developed for Australian cities and adapted for developing countries by Paul et al. (2018), accounts for every major flow: centralized piped supply, decentralized groundwater, precipitation, stormwater runoff, wastewater, evapotranspiration, leakage.

Urban political ecology (UPE) asks the question that water mass balance on its own can't answer: who controls these flows, and who is excluded from them? It treats water infrastructure not as a neutral technical system but as a socio-political one — shaped by caste, class, governance failures, and power.

PIE puts these together. You get the numbers from the water mass balance. You get the politics from UPE. Neither alone is sufficient. The number tells you groundwater extraction doubled; UPE tells you that the tourism industry's borewells are what drove it, and that the people paying the price are Dalit households whose community hand-pumps are drying up.

We used 2001 and 2019 as our two comparison points — pre- and post-World Heritage designation — because both years had enough secondary data to make the water mass balance calculations workable, and because 2019 captured the tourism peak before COVID disrupted everything.

What the Numbers Showed

The transformation between 2001 and 2019 was significant enough that I'm still processing what it means.

In 2001, the centralized (piped) water supply was 985 million litres, and decentralized groundwater — hand-pumps, borewells — accounted for another 798 million litres. Tourist numbers that year were around 206,000. Direct tourist water consumption was 92 million litres.

By 2019: centralized supply had grown to 2,628 million litres, and decentralized groundwater to 1,643 million litres. Tourist arrivals had hit 1.6 million. Direct tourist consumption — based on 150 litres per tourist per day for a 3-day stay — was 731 million litres. An eightfold increase.

Total groundwater extraction went from 1,586 million litres in 2001 to 4,271 million litres in 2019. More than doubled. Meanwhile, groundwater seepage — the rate at which water replenishes the aquifer — declined from 3,081 to 2,775 million litres over the same period, partly because built-up surfaces reduced infiltration. The town is extracting far more than it's replenishing.

The stored water figure tells the starkest version of this story. In 2001, the water balance showed a 209 million litre surplus in stored water. By 2019, it showed a 65 million litre deficit. The town has crossed from surplus to deficit over two decades. This is what tourism-driven urbanization does to a groundwater-dependent small town.

There's a caveat I want to be honest about: both stored water values technically should be zero in a balanced system, and the discrepancy partly reflects data limitations — particularly around groundwater stores and water bodies like ponds, which are very difficult to account for precisely. The direction of the trend is clear even if the exact numbers carry uncertainty.

The Leakage Problem Nobody Is Solving

One finding that doesn't get enough attention, even in the policy discussions I've been part of: leakage from the piped water supply jumped from 15% in 2001 to 35% in 2019.

That means more than a third of the centralized water supply in 2019 — 919 million litres — never reached any household or business. It leaked out of aging PHED pipes and improperly installed JWIL pipelines lying on roads without taps or built into walls without proper connections.

For context: the town has been receiving piped water since 1965, has had two major infrastructure programs (the JNNURM project from 2011 and the Har Ghar Ganga Jal scheme from 2022), and still only reaches about 9.4% of households with direct connections. Over 68% of households depend entirely on borewells and hand-pumps. The piped system has been expanded and upgraded and still manages to lose more than a third of what it delivers.

The wastewater treatment plant that was supposed to be built under JNNURM was never completed. The reason cited in official documents: corruption. So wastewater and stormwater discharge directly into the Niranjana River, which runs through the town and is also a sacred site. The traditional Ahar-Pyne irrigation network — agricultural tanks connected by interlinked canals — has been converted into a de facto sewage system because the Pynes now carry wastewater during monsoon.

The Politics: Who Is Actually Paying for This

The water mass balance gives you the aggregate picture. Urban political ecology gives you the distribution.

In 2019, approximately 70% of Bodh Gaya's permanent population had no access to piped water at all. Of those who did, most were connected to stand-posts rather than household taps. The piped supply is concentrated around the "core" — the area near the Mahabodhi Temple and the settlements around it.

The peripheral neighbourhoods — where scheduled caste communities, particularly Maha Dalit households (Bhuinyas and Musahars), live — are at the end of the network, or off it entirely. They depend on community hand-pumps 30 to 35 feet deep. During the pre-monsoon dry season, known locally as lehar ka samay, the groundwater level drops beyond the reach of those pumps. The over-extraction driven by tourism industry borewells — many of them 150 feet deep, some with gardens and swimming pools — compounds this directly.

One ward member told us during our interviews: "For the Maha Dalits, water is a major problem. We gave toilet to the people; but without water, toilet is of no use, at least 10–15 litres of water required for a person to use toilet... while outside one litre is enough."

An elderly woman from ward 13 said: "Water is a major issue, the government has given the pipe, but the water does not come in this street... everyone has a motor pump... we don't have nothing."

These aren't exceptional voices. They're describing the normal functioning of a governance system that has consistently prioritized the temple core and the tourism industry over peripheral residential areas. The water demands of hotels and monasteries are not accounted for in any municipal planning document I was able to find. They're simply not there.

The Ganga Water Scheme, and Why It's Not the Answer

In November 2022, Bodh Gaya started receiving surface water from the Ganga under the Gangajal Aapurti Yojana scheme. The water is lifted from the Ganga near Patna — about 150 kilometres away — and piped to three towns in South Bihar, including Bodh Gaya.

This is a USD 465 million project. It's one of the largest water infrastructure investments in Bihar's recent history.

My concern with it — and I want to be careful here because I understand why it happened — is that it's a solution that looks outward rather than inward. Bodh Gaya's stormwater runoff in 2019 was 5,025 million litres. Total centralized and decentralized water demand combined was around 4,271 million litres. The town's stormwater runoff alone exceeds its total water demand. Groundwater recharge through better stormwater management, combined with wastewater reuse for non-potable applications like irrigation, could address a significant share of the scarcity without going 150 kilometres to the Ganga.

Instead, the Ahar-Pyne system that was designed precisely for local water storage has become a sewage channel. The town is importing water from a distant river while the water management infrastructure that existed for centuries is being dismantled.

This is not a criticism of the engineers or the politicians who built the scheme. It's a structural problem: small towns like Bodh Gaya are governed by frameworks designed for larger cities, and the locally adapted solutions — the ponds, the Ahars, the Pynes — don't fit neatly into those frameworks.

What I Think the PIE Framework Adds

I've been asked a few times whether the PIE approach actually produced insights that either water mass balance alone or political ecology alone couldn't have given me. I think yes, and for a specific reason.

Without the water mass balance, I had ethnographic evidence of scarcity and political accounts of who was excluded — but I couldn't show the mechanism. I couldn't demonstrate that tourist groundwater extraction was quantitatively responsible for the hand-pump failures in Dalit neighbourhoods. With the water balance, the numbers make that connection explicit: extraction more than doubled, recharge declined, deficit emerged.

Without the political ecology, the water balance was a set of flows without agents. It told me groundwater went from 1,586 to 4,271 million litres but couldn't tell me that the tourism industry drives the majority of that increase, or that the governance system doesn't account for tourist water demand in planning, or that women from scheduled caste communities are the ones walking further for water as a result.

Together they make an argument that neither discipline could make alone.

What I'm Still Sitting With

The study has limitations I want to name clearly. The 2001 data relies heavily on the City Development Plan and Census records, which means limited ability to verify everything. We couldn't account for agricultural and livestock water demand, which is significant in a town that's still substantially agrarian. Bottled water — which tourists consume in huge quantities and which the town's monastery gift shops sell by the case — isn't in the calculation.

And the political ecology findings are based on 30 semi-structured interviews, which is enough to identify patterns but not enough to claim comprehensive coverage of every community's experience.

What I keep returning to is something simpler than any of the technical findings. The Mahabodhi Temple complex is one of the most visited religious sites on earth. The hotel and monastery industry around it generates significant revenue. And the people who built and maintain that town — who have lived there for generations, who fetch water before sunrise from hand-pumps that run dry in May — are not included in any calculation of what the town needs.

That exclusion is not incidental. It's structural. And it predates the UNESCO designation. The designation accelerated it.

Tourism Drank the Groundwater: Mapping Water Flows in Bodh Gaya Before and After UNESCO