80% rural homes have no potable water source: Study

More than 80 per cent of people in rural areas of the State have no  accesss to a potable drinking water source within their residential premises which is forcing them to depend on inferior and unsafe options, says a research study by the Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC). 

The study conducted by Prof D Rajasekhar and R Manjula at the Centre for Decentralisation and Development, ISEC, highlighted that only 18.5 percent of the total households in Karnataka reported that drinking water source was within the household premises.

“The long distance to access potable drinking water forces people to fall back on inferior and unsafe sources,” said the researchers who studied data on drinking water supply services collected from 5,212 out of 5,665 Gram Panchayats (GPs) in the State.

The study – ‘Decentralised Governance and Service Delivery: Affordability of Drinking Water Supply by Gram Panchayats in Karnataka’ – revealed that more than 58 per cent of the GPs in the State were spending more than Rs five for each rupee of receipts, raising serious questions of affordability.
 
“The analysis shows that a large number of GPs in the State spend much more than what they received towards drinking water provisioning. The affordability of GPs to operate and maintain water supply sources is less,” the report said.

The research found that although poor access to drinking water supply was the result of several factors, poor affordability by GPs to maintain water supply sources was an important factor. A large number of the GPs, which incur expenditure on electricity, maintenance charges and salaries to watermen, fixed water rates at less than Rs 20 per household per month.

There was no attempt to find out the affordability of water supply services through periodic calculations and mid-course corrections and inefficiency in expenditure on water supply sources contributed to the problem.

The study recommended listing of all houses in the jurisdiction of the GPs and bringing them under the house tax (including user charges and water cess) net.

“The State government should enable GPs to arrive at the house tax on equity basis (fixing tax on the basis of size and quality of the house),” the researchers said.

GPs should apply water user rates as prescribed by the government and periodically revise them. “The overall suggestion is that the State government should work out incentives in such a way that they motivate the GPs to improve tax or user charge base, collect all the cess and water user charges they fix and periodically revise tax and water user rates,” the researchers said.