Assessment of urban carrying capacities with respect to their basic infrastructure provisions like water supply and sanitation helps to determine the relative potentials of individual urban centres across regions for sustainable growth and also provides a framework for rational sectoral and spatial allocations of resources for infrastructure development. While carrying capacities should be assessed against acceptable norms and standards for provision of the basic services, there is ample scope for further development of minimum standards for urban water supply and sanitation in India. There has been a multiplicity of recommendations of standards with wide disparity across them and the rationale behind these recommendations are not explicit. The paper develops an array of indicator measures through which the natural and man-made resources and assimilative capacities of urban areas with respect to water supply, sewerage, drainage and solid waste disposal can be assessed in quantitative and qualitative terms. Another set of indicators have been developed to assess the financial and managerial capacities of various local institutions in the provision of these utilities. A framework for the use of these urban carrying capacity measures in spatial planning has been suggested. The author suggests further research to test the applicability of these indicator measures through real-life case studies of Indian cities based on available environmental information base.