Reality check on the right to water

The right to access to clean drinking water is fundamental to life and there is a duty on the state under Article 21 to provide clean drinking water to its citizens,? says the Supreme Court (AP Pollution Control Board II v Professor M V Naidu and Others).

How is this right to be fulfilled? This last and final article in our series on water looks at the micro aspects of India?s water woes: where water and water infrastructure directly impact everyday lives of households.

The obvious starting point: somebody?public or private?must invest in urban water systems and rural water purification. The controversy over public, private, or public-private responsibility is a distraction from the more important questions about how water supply projects can be structured to succeed in the Indian context. Take tubewells, for example. The successful coping strategy is actually an obstacle to water system development. They are environmentally unsustainable, leading to over-exploitation of aquifers, potential for saline incursion, and other city-wide problems, but they are convenient for the buildings that have them. Once the investment is made in sinking the well (or sinking it deeper) the taps run reliably. Any new city water supply has to provide something better (such as treated water, with the same or better reliability) and compensate well the owners for their investment in order to attract customers and be financially viable. This is a high bar to entry.

Short of banning tubewells, restricting depth (to ensure that the tubewell runs dry before the aquifer), or ?buying out? and capping existing tubewells?all politically and/or economically costly options?there is very little that can be done to encourage urban water supply systems in tubewell-dependent cities. One can only hope that we will learn to build urban water supply systems fast enough to ensure a seamless transition when the underground aquifers run dry.

Projects will also have substantial initial capital needs and will require transitional subsidies, which raises the usual dilemma of how to subsidise and how to commit to ?transitional? rather than ?permanent fiscal burden?. The fact that many people already pay for water from tankers creates some room for cost recovery, but the capital investment in expansion and clearing maintenance backlog cannot lead to an immediate price shock.

One option is for the central government to provide concessional finance to cities or private providers for a defined initial upgrade and network expansion, and require them to make separate arrangements for ongoing maintenance and operating cost recovery.

Safe drinking water will, however, require some subsidies. Fortunately, there is a wide variety of relevant subsidy models that work well around the world: differential pricing for the first ?lifeline? allowance of water and subsequent use, direct subsidy payments to poorer households are two common approaches that could be applied to water. Another option would be to offer discounted water supply packages if households supplied their own labour for connection, or user groups formed cooperatives to share a single source. Any of these approaches would make water services a model for other sectors to follow.

Rural challenges and responses are slightly different. Here, water purification at point sources takes precedence over large-scale water treatment, and supply chains of jugs and containers are more feasible than networks of pipes.

Purification is less a technical than an organisational problem. There are a variety of technologies available around the world to remove everything from bacteria to arsenic or fluoride from water. The solution has to not only remove the relevant contaminants, but also the scale has to match the scale of social arrangements for investing in and maintaining the technology. A technology that could serve five families is of no use if the five families don?t live near one another or can?t agree on a maintenance schedule.

The scale also has to be adjusted for the feasible supply chain. Saving money by purifying water in high volumes at a point source is futile if it goes back into dirty jugs. Public education and enforcing quality standards for packing and delivery are essential. If these are not realistically feasible, it may be more cost-effective to go for the smaller-scale and more expensive technologies.

Publicly supported rural water purification programmes cannot follow a ?one size fits all? approach; a better way would be to create and publicise a menu of different models and allow local governments, NGOs, user groups and households to apply for the one that suits their needs. Private initiatives in providing rural water supply should also be encouraged. State governments may consider setting targets and opening these contracts to private operators via minimum subsidy bidding.

Finally, the slow evolution of local government autonomy and capacity affects prospects for both urban and rural water supply. The fact that water supply is local infrastructure according to the Twelfth Schedule could be an advantage if local governments had the funds and functionaries to reasonably be expected to upgrade and maintain the water systems or purification technologies. We all know that water is the source of life. Its management has international, national and local dimensions. Nothing will affect our future well-being more than how imaginatively and innovatively we can address these multiple challenges.

?Regular columnists N K Singh and Professor Jessica Wallack of the University of California, San Diego, are collaborating on a book on infrastructure reforms on India