Kerala project in India
Updated - Thursday 15 January 2004
The notion that people in poor rural and peri-urban areas in India are both willing and able to pay for improved water supplies was considered absurd in central government circles through the 1980s. The prevalent thinking was that the poor are unable to pay for water, and therefore water services should be funded and operated by the State. Other assumptions included the ability of the Government of India to solve water services problems, and raise and sustain the financial resources required to solve water supply and sanitation access problems.
During the 1980s and into the 1990s, the Olavanna Gram Panchayat (GP) in Kozhikode district in the southern Indian state of Kerala, suffered from a lack of reliable and safe water sources. The Kerala Water Authority (KWA) was responsible for providing water and sanitation to Kerala's six Gram Panchayats. (A Gram Panchayat is the village-level government body that is comprised of elected representatives from one or more villages.) KWA provided networked service to 1,600 households through one water scheme, although financial and institutional constraints prevented it from expanding the network to serve Olavanna's greater population of 50,000. As a result, many poor women spent up to five hours a day fetching water from nearby streams and wells of questionable quality.
After residents picketed the Gram Panchayat office, the KWA provided Olavanna with an additional piped water system that distributed water to public standpipes. This project served 400 households and was funded by state grants. Still, thousands of households were left without a safe water supply, and the people were informed that state budget constraints prevented further improvements.
As a result, a few people organized themselves to self-finance the costs of pumps and intake wells for small groups of households. With each success, more households grouped to self-finance their water supplies, and eventually 54 of these household groups formed a cooperative to provide organizational and financial structure to the process. The formation of the cooperative also served to legitimize their operations and promote development of additional cooperatives.
In the beginning, each house contributed 4,500-12,000 rupees (roughly US$95-250) in capital costs for a piped water scheme, and 5-10 rupees (US$0.10-0.20) per month for operation and maintenance. Now, costs vary depending on geographic and other variables. Connection costs are flexibly designed, such that users may pay in instalments over an agreed period of time. In some schemes, the poor are given an opportunity to help defray the costs by contributing labour during construction. Although no money is set aside for depreciation or expansion, the cooperatives have been able to operate at a surplus.
As the success of the system has grown, the policy framework in India has shifted toward a more decentralized approach. The KWA, which was initially unsupportive of the system, as the cooperative was perceived as an affront to its authority, has become more accepting. Now it plays a supportive role, facilitating the scheme's expansion to include more communities and households. Olavanna's Gram Panchayat also plays a facilitating and regulatory role, providing annual reviews for the cooperatives under its jurisdiction. Due to groundwater constraints, the GP has also developed rules and limits for extraction with stiff penalties for excess water use. The GP also encourages metering and volumetric-based charges, which are generally followed.
Thus, what started in response to a lack of available finance has now developed into 35 separate cooperative schemes, benefiting 10,000 households - roughly the entire population of Olavanna. With decentralization policies in place, the GP is able to provide up to 50% of the capital costs for households that are unable to afford them. As of 2000, the monthly costs of water supply have risen to 30-40 rupees per month (US$0.60-0.80), due to the rising costs of electricity. However, user fees are capped at 50 rupees per month (roughly $1.00).
For further information
See: WSP
Contact: Olavanna Gram Panchayat
Kozhikode, Kerala
Tel: 0495 - 430788
