There are both in Delhi - criminal waste, unendurable want. And in this city of verdant veneers, nowhere does the callous politics of dispossession show its slip more than in the titanic economics of water. Water led the way to the formation of cities; the misuse of it can undo the best of them as well. Delhi is becoming what a metropolis has no right to be - corpulent and blind drunk with power at one end, parched, sorry and getting sorrier by the day at the other. And the land is squeezed to an inch of its life, its provenance of Water running dry. And what of this special status Delhi has anointed on itself. Can it with impunity make its richest citizens the largest shareholders of the cheapest water on earth? Can it now pummel borewells into its own body to haul out its thinning blood? Surprisingly, all of it, with panache to spare. Delhi is exhausting its own future, and that of millions of others besides. There was water in the beginning. In the end, there will be dry land. And if the likes of Delhi flounder on as now, there might be none of us to mourn our own passing. The search for what Delhi is doing with its water took Down to Earth's Uday Shankar, Aniruddha Bahal and Max Martin on a searing tour of India's First City and its environs. What they learnt follows: