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the current deficit in basic needs products and services for the large
number of families in rural and urban settlements be seen as an
opportunity? Can meeting this gap be done in a manner that provides
futuristic solutions for a sustainable tomorrow? Acceptance of this
hypothesis would imply that we need technology solutions and delivery
methods quite different from what we are used to today. Interesting
combinations of the public-private-community partnership models are
emerging for servicing the housing, drinking water, sanitation and
energy needs of rural and urban communities using clean and green
technologies.
Accessibility and availability
deficits with iniquitous distribution have led to the poor paying very
high costs for meeting their basic needs. And, despite paying higher
costs, they receive inadequate quantity and questionable quality of
housing, safe drinking water and domestic energy. Service delivery to
geographically dispersed communities in rural India and to poor urban
un-regularised settlements poses several challenges. These include high
costs of infrastructure development and management, maintaining quality
of service in villages and limitations of local municipal authorities to
provide permanent infrastructure to un-regularised urban settlements.
Decentralised delivery of basic
needs goods and services offers many opportunities while leaping over
current challenges in interesting ways. Decentralisation requires local
capacities to be created to service local markets and communities. This
creates more jobs. Along with localised capacities, decentralisation
enhances local system control and limits unmanageable and catastrophic
large scale failures as we have seen in the national grid collapse and
water borne epidemics. Localised system disruptions can be dealt with,
without major losses.
Decentralisation also reduces
the risk of locking in capital in large infrastructure that may be based
on obsolete and potentially unsustainable technology choices. This
enables systems to quickly modernise as opportunities become available.
Hidden in the decentralisation
process is another amazing opportunity to select and promote cleaner and
greener technologies relevant to individual contexts. For example, the
affordable home construction service can be packaged with green
construction technologies. The technologies help in bringing the price
point down making the end product cheaper; and, clubbed with other
services such as financing, they make homes more accessible to
communities. In addition, by virtue of being decentralised, they promote
local production of green materials and local skills, creating green
jobs and improving local economies in the process.
The Development Alternatives
Group’s initiatives in incubating such eco-systems in the area of rural
housing, water supply and energy services are providing useful lessons
with respect to capacities required, investments needed, support systems
for product and service delivery entrepreneurs, enabling policies and
regulations and most importantly, strategies for market development.
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