Poor But Spritied In Karimnagar by Sumita Dawra

Author:Sumita Dawra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: non-fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Since the 1960s, the Central government has been taking up access to safe drinking water as a priority issue. Sanitation too joined the list of priorities in the 1980s. Huge sums of money were allocated and spent by both the Central and the state governments on these priority items. The Rajiv Gandhi Technology Mission was set up in the 1980s to give prominence to these issues. Huge fund outlays continue to be made, annually, for improving water supply in rural and urban areas under the Bharat Nirman2 and the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission3 programmes, respectively. Yet, according to UNICEF India statistics, only 88 per cent of the population in 2008 was using improved drinking water sources. Moreover, the quality of water might be of concern at places, as also the continuity of water supply. For example, in urban areas, none of the thirty-five Indian cities with a population over ten lakhs are supplied water more than a few designated hours a day.4 In the rural areas, depleting groundwater levels, erratic power supply and contamination of groundwater sources remain common grounds for anxiety with respect to supply of drinking water. Twenty-one per cent of communicable diseases in India are water related, with 1,600 deaths a day on account of water pollution.5 Despite huge resource allocation over the years, safe and sufficient drinking water supply continues to be a development priority for the country. Sometimes leading to economically inefficient but necessary interventions, like transporting water in tankers to the villages (and water-scarce wards in the towns/cities).

TRANSPORTING DRINKING WATER

During the peak of summer, the Rural Water Supply department used to organize transportation of 32 lakh litres of water a day (!) to various areas of Karimnagar district. The Telengana districts of Andhra Pradesh faced a below average rainfall for three consecutive years, in 2001–03. Each year a similar exercise in water transportation through tankers to the rural areas would be undertaken. Roughly half the villages in the district faced ‘severe’ to ‘moderate’ water shortage. This despite sanctioning crores of rupees worth of works for exploiting new sources of water, augmentation of the existing sources (which basically meant further deepening of the existing bores), repairs of the old waterworks, besides the perennial sanction of works taken by the Rural Water Supply department from the district collector, round the year, for extension of drinking-water pipelines to water-deficit areas. One constantly worried about the tankers actually making the number of trips to the villages they were being paid for. There were systems to check and monitor, but it was a Herculean exercise for the district administration.The best thing we could do was regularly share the information on the trips claimed to have been made and the expenditures incurred with the public through the local editions of the dailies, relying on whistleblowing as a means of detecting leakages, if any. Perhaps the system could have been more efficient if the job of undertaking water transportation, recording and payment of trips had been left entirely to the panchayats and the communities.

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