|
Service Delivery in the WASH Sector S ervice delivery is crucial in the context of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH). In India approximately, 99 million people do not have access to improved water sources and 626 million do not have access to sanitation facilities.1 The government is responsible for providing these services, but unfortunately the government’s delivery and upkeep of WASH resources is unreliable.Waterborne diseases affect 37.7 million Indians annually. 1.5 million children are estimated to die of diarrhoea alone and 73 million working days are lost due to waterborne disease each year. The public water supply system has not been able to provide WASH facilities to communities. Private players are entering and flourishing in the market because of their efficient delivery of services. In context of water, in rural areas there is a lack of centralised purification facilities and the water gets contaminated either at source or during the supply. In urban areas, due to deteriorating infrastructure, even water that has been purified at source gets contaminated during the supply. The primary reasons for this contamination are open defecation (in rural areas) and mixing with sewage (in urban areas). To complicate the matter further, water also gets contaminated at the point of use due to unsanitary handling and storage. Not just the quality, but the supply of adequate quantity of water is also a major concern in India where only 31% of the 167 million rural households in India have access to tap water. 2 The key channels of delivery of water services are as follows:1. Piped Water Supply: The government has laid
down a network of pipes (mainly in urban areas) that provide treated (at
source) drinking water either directly to households or to community tap
stands. This water is provided free of cost or at a very low cost. As
mentioned earlier, the water tends to get contaminated either at the
source, during transmission or while collection and storage.
2. Retail Shops/Distributor Model: This distribution model is followed by private companies selling chlorine tablets, low-cost offline filters or even relatively expensive water purification solutions such as RO/UV and bottled water. Currently, this model does not have an efficient ‘last mile’ delivery system and thus these products are not easily or readily available to the end user, especially in rural and peri-urban areas. The other problem is of disclosure of information by these private companies about the quality of the product. 3. Water Tankers: Government as well as private players provide water to the community through water tankers where there is shortage of water. The water in these tankers is generally treated with chlorine. The quality of this water is questionable as no guarantee for safety is provided by the service provider. 4. Government Distribution System: The government has dug handpumps and bore wells (mainly in rural areas) to provide access to water. The chances of this water being contaminated at source are high due to increasing ground water pollution due to use of chemical fertilizers and open defecation. In the context of sanitation, the situation is much worse, as India accounts for about 50% of the world’s open defecating population. 3The sanitation coverage of urban India is much higher than rural India where people prefer to defecate in open. Government of India is running flagship schemes for more than a decade to overcome the deficit, but still there is a huge lag because the focus is on providing hardware services (engineering or construction elements) and the software component (capacity building, institutional support, financial planning) is missing while delivering these services. So, the households which have toilets in rural areas still prefer to defecate in open areas. The reasons for this problem are two-fold. The toilets built under these flagship programmes are often inadequate with no access to water and soak pits. So generally after using it for two to three months, the toilets are transformed into storing spaces. The other side of the problem is that in India, using a facility for defecation in or near your house may not seem natural as the people have been practicing open defecation since decades. The sanitation component needs to focus on the whole service delivery ecosystem which supports construction of soak pits, cleaning of soak pits, sewage treatment, drain and lane improvements, community awareness programmes for improving sanitation and hygiene practices, along with incentives to communities / villages for achieving ‘open defecation status’. Current Policy Scenario The responsibility for water supply and sanitation at the central government level is shared by the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation for rural areas and the Ministry of Urban Development for urban areas. The responsibility for provision of water supply and sanitation in India is a state government responsibility under the Indian Constitution. States may give the responsibility to the Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRI) in rural areas or municipalities in urban areas, called Urban Local Bodies (ULB). At present, states generally plan, design and execute water supply schemes (and often operate them) through their State Departments (Public Health Engineering or Rural Development Engineering) or State Water Boards. Recently to solve the sanitation crisis, the government launched a Swaach Bharat Mission for both urban and rural areas with a mission to make India - Open Defecation free by 2019. This mission does not focus merely on constructing toilets but there is a component of IEC activities, Capacity Building, Solid and Liquid Waste Management and Setting of Village Sanitary Marts. Policy Recommendations for Improving Service Delivery of WASH Services • Subsidies should be set into place keeping in mind the whole life cycle approach. For instance in the space of sanitation, there are subsidies for construction of toilets but limited subsidies are available for treatment of sewage and cleaning of soak pits. • There a need to track the performance of the service delivering entity on the service level benchmarks developed by Central Ministries for rural and urban areas. The state government should be tracked and the grants should be released against their performance on service level benchmarks. • Data collection system needs to be strengthened for understanding the efficiency of delivered water and sanitation services. As presently the quality of services are compromised in order to reach numbers. In the context of water, the quality of water supplied through the particular source is not known to the end user. In the sanitation area, there is data available on how many toilets are funded as part of the government schemes but there is no information on how many people are using the toilets and how many are redundant. The data collection system should be transparent and accountable for designing effective delivery of services. • Favourable environment for innovation to incubate as presently the current policy environment is very rigorous and only innovation which has huge financial backing can overcome those processes. This needs to loosen up a little so that small innovations can contribute in improving services. • Public Private Partnerships need to be explored when it comes to water and sanitation services. There are some initiatives which have been piloted which can be scaled up in order to provide quality services to the end users. • In WASH there is no ‘One solution fit All’ as people’s needs, demands and behaviors are different from each other. There is a need to promote community based solutions as they focus on empowering local people as people are at the core of designing these solutions. • Third Party Validation of Water Treatment Products: There is a need to formulate disclosure norms for water treatment products which should be validated by a third party before the product enters the market to safeguard consumer interests. There is also a need to reduce the gap between standards development and technology advancement. All these recommendations are necessary for improving the service delivery of the WASH sector. There is a need to form stronger regulatory mechanisms for States to follow so that quality and reliable services are delivered as the investment in WASH has an impact on GDP and economic wellbeing. q Kavneet Kaur Endnotes 2 http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2014/01/07/rural-water-supply-sanitation-four-indian-states 3 www.worldbank.org/.../rural-water-supply-sanitation-four-indian-states
|
