9 Priorities for India’s Drinking Water Sector: Summary of REAL-Water Roundtable
Government officials, researchers and practitioners in the water sector convened for a roundtable organised in New Delhi as part of the REAL-Water project funded by the USAID.
Veena Srinivasan
How do we ensure source sustainability in areas where groundwater is overexploited? How are drinking water systems vulnerable to floods? How effective are wastewater systems in rural India? These were some of the important questions raised during a wide-ranging roundtable discussion held in New Delhi on August 17 as part of the Rural Evidence and Learning for Water (REAL-Water) program.
CSEI-ATREE is part of a consortium led by the Aquaya Institute that is researching strategies for expanding access to safe, equitable, and sustainable rural water services. One year into this project, we conducted a roundtable discussion to share our research agenda with researchers and practitioners involved in the water sector, as well as senior government officials such as the Additional Secretary and Director (AS & MD) of the Jal Jeevan Mission, Vikas Sheel; and the Additional Secretary of the Department of Water Resources, Debashree Mukherjee. This blog post summarises some of the top priorities shared by the participants (full list below).
Poor water resources management is affecting rural drinking water services
India is facing a water crisis with multiple sectors vying for the same depleting resource. At the policy level, there are ambitious projects underway to ensure drinking water services, mainly the Jal Jeevan Mission launched in 2019. JJM envisions to provide drinking water supply in adequate quantity and of prescribed quality — on regular and long-term basis — at affordable service delivery charges. This is critical to improve living standards of rural communities. JJM guidelines and the planning and implementation of JJM projects is a critical part of our research.
Through a literature review of past and current policies such as JJM, and extensive expert interviews, we compiled the pathways by which poor water resources management impacts drinking water security.
- First, drinking water supply relies on a common pool resource, which is also tapped by agriculture and industry. In many parts of India, groundwater and surface water (which is connected to groundwater) are getting depleted — largely driven by irrigation water use.
- Second, as water sources decline, there are water quality impacts too. In coastal areas, sea water intrusion is rendering groundwater saline, in fluoride and arsenic affected areas declining groundwater are moving villages formerly within permissible limits to cross thresholds. Many communities are having to invest in expensive reverse osmosis (RO) treatment systems.
- Third, water use results in generation of wastewater, which if not properly treated, results in contamination of the source.
- Finally, climate change poses a significant threat due to both prolonged floods and droughts. Many villages lose access to water temporarily and are rendered water insecure.
These four broad problem areas encompass a range of complex issues that cut across different sectors and levels of government. To guide the next stages of this five-year REAL-Water research program, discussions at this workshop honed in on nine priorities:
#1 What are the drivers of behaviour change with regards to irrigation water use?
The narrow focus on ‘source sustainability’ under JJM ends up focusing attention on recharge pits around the source. It does not guarantee resource sustainability. This approach has inherent limits.
Individual borewells cannot be sustained in isolation when the aquifer itself is getting depleted due to over-abstraction by industry and agriculture.
Behaviour change around groundwater-based irrigation: crop diversification, fallowing, and irrigation efficiency is an important part of the solution. But little is known about the drivers and mechanisms of behaviour change around groundwater use.
#2 What are the drivers of household level behaviour with regards to drinking water use?
Behaviour of households after introduction of piped water has evolved in unexpected ways. There is often low trust in water quality resulting in a persistence of drinking water purchase. In other cases, perception of water quality is based just on sight and smell; it is leading to consumption of unsafe water. In quantity terms, studies on how water delivered to the house is used (whether diverted for livestock, kitchen gardens) are lacking.
#3 At the community level, does sense of ownership matter more than professionalisation?
What matters most in how villages manage their water systems is the locus of control. Increasing digitalisation of data, a focus of the government, only results in greater alienation of the poor from the water user community.
The large-scale engineering push towards multi-village systems and piped water supply have also resulted in communities feeling alienated from their water systems resulting in low trust and willingness to pay and conserve.
#4 How to ensure source sustainability in areas where groundwater is overexploited?
Groundwater is severely overexploited in the hard rock areas of peninsular India and the Indo-Gangetic plains in the north of the country. In Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka, supply remains reliant primarily on groundwater. In these regions, is it possible to attempt conjunctive use of ground and surface water (source diversification)? What institutional models exist? There are examples of source diversification models such as the Mission Bhagiratha model in Telangana that need to be studied.
It is also important to look into a trend of villages abandoning their own traditional sources with the coming of piped water supply in their house compounds. This shift from collective to individual behaviour makes the community more vulnerable in the long term because in the event of a failure of the piped water supply, water is not available even from their traditional sources.
#5 What are the functions, functionaries and funds needed to ensure WRM at the community level?
Functions: The JJM envisions the panchayat taking responsibility of WRM — but there is no clarity on what kind of institutional structures, regulatory mechanisms and disclosure systems are needed across different biophysical typologies to make sure this works.
There are efforts at the national and state levels to work towards better convergence and inter-departmental coordination. One example is the European Union-funded model in Rajasthan which adopted an IWRM approach, but early results on success in controlling groundwater use are not very encouraging.
Functionaries: The JJM model relies on a cadre of community-based water professionals (members of the local community or the Village Water and Sanitation Committee (VWSC)) for a range of functions from water testing to operations and maintenance (O&M). The skills required for this simply do not exist. Addressing this requires creating ‘contextual knowledge at scale’. Moreover, even if capacity building is done, there is no database of trained people, so each new programme ends up looking for new people from scratch.
We want to understand whether efforts by states such as Meghalaya and Gujarat to create a cadre of ‘Community Resource Persons’ has been effective and how these work on the ground, particularly who pays them and who they are accountable to.
Finances: One of the big challenges with JJM’s source sustainability component is that while it is acknowledged in principle, no funds are tied to it. One challenge is understanding how funding convergence has been achieved via JJM and other schemes such as the Atal Bhujal Yojana, the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA).
#6 How effective are existing wastewater management systems in villages? To what extent is wastewater an issue for source contamination?
Wastewater is a major issue in many villages. There are a few different models — soak pits, wastewater stabilisation ponds — that have been implemented. However, a systematic study of efficacy is missing. A big challenge is the complete absence of wastewater characterisation in rural India — which makes it even harder to design treatment systems.
#7 How are drinking water systems vulnerable to floods (that may become more extreme under climate change?)
In flood-prone states like Bihar, drinking water systems need to account for the local contexts of the flood plains. If systems are not designed for floods, they are rendered unusable for many months (due to many reasons such as siltation, clogging and pump failure). Assessments and design principles accounting for local flood contexts are needed.
#8 How is WRM for WASH different in mountain communities?
Mountains are difficult terrains. They are largely spring dependent. Here, there are major challenges because many springs are privately owned. Therefore, private water service providers often dominate rural water supply. Further, there are severe upstream/downstream issues in both water quality and source management. The big challenge is that upstream communities are very reluctant to invest resources in spring shed programs when all the benefits accrue to downstream communities.
#9 Can we offer models of how integrated management of WRM and WASH might occur across typologies?
India is very vast and geographically diverse. This makes understanding and sharing of lessons a complex endeavour. However, there is one common goal — ensuring water service delivery, good water quality, all 12 months of the year. What is therefore needed are useful typologies and models for what will work in each typology.
The REAL-Water project is made possible by the support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The contents of this post are the sole responsibility of the REAL-Water consortium members and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government.
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