Assessing service Quality of urban water supply : A case of shivpuri city

Abstract

The physical availability of water differs from place to place which makes the management of this essential resource very difficult, thus requires massive infrastructure for transferring water from source to user end. Having access to safe and clean water has been perceived as a basic right for human existence by the United Nations, still about 663 million population are with no access to improved drinking water plus 2.1 billion population with no safely managed drinking water. In the case of Indian cities, it is very unusual to have an uninterrupted water supply even in metro cities. Water utilities in Indian cities with a centralized approach of water supply have failed in providing water access to all and suffer from huge monetary losses because of frequent maintenance works and small recovery of incurred cost. Centralized water supply in an intermittent manner imposes high coping costs on the consumers. Some cities are provided with water supply for less than 2 hrs per day and some receive less than 135 liters per capita per day (lpcd), which is a bare minimum requirement as stated by Central Public Health and Environmental Engineering Organisation (CPHEEO). By considering the service level benchmarks (SLBs) meant for urban water supply formulated by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), Government of India, the service qualit associated with water provisioning in Shivpuri city has been assessed in this research. In Shivpuri city, water sector reforms introduced over the last many decades have resulted in various environmental, social, economic, and administrative challenges. Initially, the centralized system for water provisioning of the city is limited to its core area and the fringe area entirely depends on the groundwater. The city lies in a drought-prone region thus during summer the groundwater extraction reduced to half and to meet the demand the water is supplied through tankers all over the city. On a larger scale, this informal transfer of water leads to inequality of water distribution as the one who can afford have more benefit than the other. To improve and expand the water supply services within the city, an augmentation project financed by the Urban Infrastructure Development Scheme for Small and Medium Towns (UIDSSMT) was proposed in 2007 with a PPP model from a new water source which is 32 km from the city. The failure of the partnership led to the expelling of the private player in the mid of the project and now under the AMRUT scheme, the project work is still under process. The total water demand with 1.8 lakh population of the city is 27 million liters per day (mld) but the Shivpuri Municipal Council (SMC) can supply up to 12mld of water. In the small urban centers such as Shivpuri, the agencies responsible for water supply provisioning are saddled with technical and financial constraints. The total monthly cost invested by the Shivpuri Municipal Council is about 20 lakhs and the return is just three lakhs, making the cost recovery of 15% only. Thus, the quality of service becomes inferior and has a direct impact on the well-being of the public. Hence, in this study, the service quality assessment of water supply is based on the public perception and for that, a sample size of 214 household through stratified sampling has been done. Taking time restriction into consideration eight out of 39 wards have been surveyed. To have an overall view of the city the selection of these eight wards is based on the following parameterswards with and without water supply system; core and fringe area; different water sources; fair and poor water quality; and high and low population density. The average water supplied by the municipal council in the core area is just 32.25 lpcd whereas the average demand came out as 283 lpcd, which is majorly fulfilled through borewells and later with tankers. This scenario gets worse during summer when the groundwater level falls and the supply also gets reduces as said by 66% of respondents. The average continuity of supply for the city is only 48 minutes a day that to with no full pressure, requires a motor pump at the user ends. Around 70% of respondents said the water is supplied for three-four days a week thus they have to store water for the next days. The ineffectual services from centralized water supply systems and the financial burden on the utility demands for community participation in the better and sustainable management of this infrastructure. The decentralized approach by using the water source available near to users has been proposed. At the city level, there is no proper system for wastewater treatment. As per SMC, approximately 22 mld of wastewater is produced and discharged to local water bodies, which was once the city water source. Thus the reuse of domestic wastewater both at community and household level have been considered. To implement this approach, the identification of barriers against its acceptance by the public has been assessed through literature. Later the strategies for implementing the samp have been endorsed.