Delivery of Safe Drinking Water in Rural India: An Appraisal of Public Water Supply Initiatives

Availability of potable water is crucial for ensuring better quality of life. As the demand for potable water is inelastic, it’s mostly provided by the public agencies in countries like India. Owing to poor conservation of rainwater and lack of surface water treatment, public supply of water largely depends on groundwater. However, due to rapid depletion of groundwater and declining water table, the focus has now shifted to piped water supply. While earlier water supply policies have stressed on habitation-based water connection the recent policies and programs have focused more on household-level connection. In tune with this, delivery of water supply is now more decentralized and the capacity of the local institutions has been augmented to increase water coverage. However, recent reports suggest that a substantial portion of rural populace still lacks drinking water supply in their premise. The paucity of water coverage necessitates deeper probe into the implementation of the rural water supply programs. In this paper, we review the rural water supply programs and the rationale for shifting the target from habitation to household via decentralization. We further investigate the coverage of piped water connection under the National Rural Drinking Water Program (NRDWP) and attempt to identify the critical stumbling blocks that impedes universal water connection. We superimpose groundwater level data obtained from the Central Ground Water Commission on piped water connection data. We use panel regressions to estimate the influence of decentralization on the extent of water coverage controlling for groundwater availability and population demographics. Our results suggest that decentralization might not have been effective in increasing water coverage even after controlling for groundwater availability. The findings suggest that along with supply side intervention demand-based management needs to be properly implemented to ensure sufficient water coverage in rural India.