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Are water supply schemes really serving the Poor?
UNDP-World Bank, Water Sanitation Programme, South Asia is looking for help in assembling examples of water supply schemes involving payment by poor people.
Conventional wisdom in India holds that poor people cannot afford to pay for the household water they need. Another claim often follows automatically : poor people must be provided with water free (or at a very low cost) by the state.
But such generalizations, if left unchallenged, may do more harm than good. For example, it could be argued that these assertions both insult poor people and stand in the way of promising solutions to a real problem.
First, such claims seem to denigrate the efforts of the vast majority of poor people, who actually do pay for the water they need, and who frequently (because of inadequate state provision) pay far more per liter consumed than do the rich. The poor pay directly, to water vendors or through other charges; and often they pay even more indirectly, through the time they waste collecting water, the time they lose and the illness they suffer because of water-related sickness, and the cash they have to set aside to buy medicines.
And second, by assigning responsibility (and implicitly also the resources) for solving the problem to the anonymous state instead of to the poor people most affected, these claims may effectively block implementation of the kinds of solution most likely to work.
So it is important to test the conventional wisdom, to juxtapose actual cases and hard realities in India. What has been the experience on the ground with payment for water, especially in schemes serving the poor? What are the implications for policy, and for the conventional wisdom?
With these questions in mind, we are looking for examples that contradict - or support - the conventional wisdom. We would be grateful for actual documents (e.g. case studies or evaluation reports) about water supply projects involving payment by the poor for citations of documents that we can try to obtain, or for references to individuals or projects that we can follow up by telephone or written correspondence.
For further details and correspondence, kindly contact :
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