No city in India offers its citizens piped water 24X7, and raw sewage often overflows into open drains. Also, in most cities, less than 50% of the population has access to piped water, and water quality has deteriorated over the years.
These are the findings of a 2009-10 World Bank study of cities in Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Haryana. The good news for Maharashtra in the report ‘Improving Urban Water Supply and Sanitation,’ which was released on Friday, is that the state is ahead on most parameters as far as water management is concerned.
Maharashtra towns receive 78 litres per capita daily (lpcd) as compared to many other cities such as Haryana, which receives 95-105 lpcd for around six hours a day, irregularly. Rajasthan has the least water and the least regularity, with a supply of less than 80 lpcd, and only 162 of its 222 towns get water every day.
Maharashtra’s water supply and sanitation department’s principal secretary Malini Shankar said the aim of the study was to improve the water supply service. “If everyone in the state is to get piped water 24X7, we have to move from a system of water supply to water management,” she said.
For instance, there is a 40% to 70% loss of water in the state against a global norm of 8%, and plugging leakages can make a huge difference. “If leakages can be brought down from 50% to 15%, this will improve both the supply of water and the regularity,” she added.
She said the state government was informing all its urban centres about the benefits of improving its water management and seeking revenue for the water supply.
Bill Kingdom, a water supply specialist at World Bank who co-authored the report with Smita Misra, a senior economist at the same, said India had comparatively good infrastructure and needed to work on that. “The international experience is that when consumers pay for the water, the supply and service is better,” he said.
