“Tirupur Water Supply and Sanitation Project: An Impediment to Sustainable Water Management?” written by Roopa Madhav in 2008 published by International Environmental Law Research Centre, Geneva, Switzerland. This case study highlights The New Tirupur Area Development Corporation Limited (NTADCL) is the first public private partnership, set up in 1995 primarily to supply industrial water to Tirupur, a major export centre for knitwear, in India. This water supply and sewerage project is also the first project to be structured on a commercial format; first concession by a state government to a public limited company to draw raw water for domestic and industrial uses and to collect revenues; the first index-based user charges and direct cost recovery for urban environmental services.  The scheme, in effect, has a direct bearing on the efforts to ensure recycling of waste water and 'zero effluents discharge' and in turn, the broader agenda of sustainable water management and conservation.

This seeks to examine the functioning of the water supply scheme - both domestic and industrial, and the new and emerging legal arrangements in promoting public-private partnerships, in the water sector. It must be noted that though the bulk of the water supplied under this project is for industrial purposes, the scheme also supplies water for domestic use to limited urban and rural populace.

The Tirupur Water Supply and Sewerage project reportedly also has a technical sophistication that is unmatched in the country. It examines the reasons behind the new project - the institutional, financial and legal aspects of the Tirupur PPP. Further,  important legal issues such as the right to water, competing interests in water, financing of projects, waste water management and the environmental consequences of the PPP. More particularly, it questions the wisdom of planning a water supply project that seeks to prioritize the needs of a polluting industry over the basic water needs of the region. After the implementation of the project in 2005, there have been significant changes in the water service delivery in the town.
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