Brass City, Burdened Water: The Industrial Water-Pollution Geography of Moradabad and a Framework for Governing It

Abstract

Moradabad, in western Uttar Pradesh, is known worldwide as the Brass City, and its brassware, electroplating, and metal-recycling clusters sustain the regional economy. The same industry discharges metal-laden effluent that has left a documented mark on the district's water: heavy metals including arsenic, chromium, copper, nickel, lead, and zinc accumulate in the sediments of the Ramganga-Ganga interfluve and threaten the shallow groundwater on which most of the district depends. This paper offers a geographical treatment of that pollution and a framework for governing it. It argues that Moradabad's contamination is best understood spatially, as a source-pathway-receptor system with a distinctive and dangerous feature: the closed interfluve basins that act as sinks, concentrating metals over time and delivering them slowly toward the aquifer rather than flushing them downstream. Read this way, the problem is not a diffuse nuisance but a set of identifiable sources, pathways, and exposed populations whose spatial relationships determine where harm occurs and where intervention will work. The paper proposes a governance framework built on cluster-scale effluent treatment, spatial zoning that separates polluting activity from recharge-sensitive ground, source-to-receptor monitoring, and an approach to the large informal component of the industry that regulation alone cannot reach. The framework is illustrated for Moradabad and is transferable to the many artisanal-industrial towns of the Global South where a livelihood-giving industry and the water it contaminates occupy the same ground.