BOOK BUILDING
Let not the flow become a trickle
D. MURALI
GOOD READ: Know all about water tariffs
Metro cities are defined as those with more than a million in population. In Class I cities, the number is one lakh or more. And next in the rung are Class II towns, with the cut-off at 50,000 or more, and so forth, right up to Class VI, with population of less than 5,000, as you can see on http://urbanindia.nic.in, the site of the Ministry of Urban Development.
In terms of water supply, just about one in five (77 of 393) Class I cities are fully covered, writes Maithili Ramachandran in one of the essays included in `Keeping the Water Flowing,' from Academic Foundation (www.academicfoundation.com) . Distressingly again, among these cities, there is wide variation in quantity supplied, measured in `lpcd' or litres per capita per day: from as low as 9 to 584 lpcd! What about Class II towns, which number more than 400? One in two receive less than 100 lpcd.
"Among the many factors that influence the supply of water are water tariffs," says Ramachandran. "Studies show that under the current system of water tariffs, even middle and upper income households in urban India are subsidised.
Tariffs are currently fixed with affordability as the overriding priority, and cost recovery is not in the reckoning at all."
She cites a 2002 work by Usha Raghupati and Vivien Foster, `A Scorecard for India' to note that tariff structures are generally unfair to industrial users and metered customers.
"India does poorly on the efficiency aspect of tariff setting, too; half of all consumers' consumption is not metered at all." This `subsidy' culture leads to `substantial coping costs for households', points out Ramachandran. How so? On the one hand, water conservation goes for a six; while on the other, people pay through the nose for self-supply.
Her essay mentions some alarming statistics: Almost one in 10 urban households lack safe access to drinking water; 66 million people across 17 States are estimated to be at risk of fluoride in water; and nearly 14 million, mainly in West Bengal, face the risk of contamination of groundwater through arsenic.
Tricky issue
Assuming you don't ask questions about other contaminants such as `iron levels, salinity, and heavy metals', we can move on the tricky issue of water pricing. Tricky, because pricing lies at the heart of equity versus efficiency dilemma, explains the author. What is often spoken of, as the best method of pricing, is the IBT (increasing block tariff) structure, with monthly water charges rising in step with increasing consumption slabs.
Though the method is widely used in the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries and the developing nations, IBT can fail to generate cost-recovery prices for water utilities, cautions Ramachandran. Because upper blocks tend to be under-priced, or the first consumption block is so large that consumers never graduate to higher blocks of consumption. The size of the first block varies a lot in Indian cities, but in every case, it is "well above what would be considered the `lifeline' block - the quantity required to meet basic human needs," reads a finding cited from the work of Clarissa Brocklehurst et al.
"Domestic users account for three per cent of surface water withdrawals and nine per cent of total groundwater withdrawals," informs the author. "Agriculture is the largest consumer of water in India, possibly due to the fact that farmers are not charged for the water they consume." Ramachandran rues that although urban India contributes more than 50 per cent towards the nation's GDP (gross domestic product), the poor in cities have been underserved in critical areas of human life, such as drinking water and sanitation, as the rural brethren.
"India needs to develop a model of water supply that is self-sustaining in the long-run," she declares. "Basic ingredients of such a set-up would involve a utility - it could be public or private - that is given responsibility for water supply in a given area or city, a regulator who represents the city's population, and a tariff structure that makes allowance for the poor without compromising on the profitability of the utility completely."
Useful collection, edited by Barun Mitra, Kendra Okonski and Mohit Satyanand.
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