First some basics. Water, according to our Constitution, is in the state list, and so actual action is in the domain of those governments. We have altogether some 76 million people who do not have access to safe water supply. Census 2011 reminds us that while 71 per cent of urban households have access to drinking water within their premises, another 21 per cent have it within a distance of one hundred metres and the remaining eight per cent still have to go beyond one hundred metres to fetch their daily requirement.
So, on the one hand, the issue is that of ensuring access for everyone within their premises. After all these years of planned development, we have not succeeded in ensuring such access. For the first time a national programme like AMRUT (Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation) has underlined the objective that the primary purpose is to cover all households with water supply and sewerage. One sincerely hopes that our states will go about it in a systematic manner to ensure this within the planned five-year period, in the targeted 500 towns.
At the same time, how good our cities are at managing water collection and distribution is becoming increasingly important. Very few cities provide water supply on a 24x7 basis. The national average is that something like fifty per cent of the water provided to cities goes waste owing to leakages and wastage, broadly termed unaccounted for water. Equitable access is something of a distant dream, assured hours of supply is rarely a reality, efficiency in the management of water utilities is something rarely focused on, waste water recycling is not a standard practice and tariff fixation that takes into account the costs of the entire process of distributing water is still not an accepted part of the management system.
But of more concern now are issues such as: what is the availability of water going to be, are our cities geared to handle shortage situations, and is there a well thought out water management plan for each of our cities. Remember that MIT scientists have recently warned of a high risk of severe water stress with countries in Asia including India having to face severe water shortage by 2050 due to rising economic activity, growing populations and climate change.
To take one example, Chennai's stated daily requirement a couple of years back was 1,500 million litres per day (mld), whereas Metro Water managed to supply an average of 1,000 million litres a day, and people had bore wells dug in a bid to meet the gap. Kerala is reported to be spending Rs 7 crore each day to buy bottled water. Mumbai needs about 4,250 million litres of water per day, but gets about 3,470 mld, with loss due to leakage and pilferage reported to be about 700 mld. Mumbaikars will have to face a ten per cent cut in water supply when the situation becomes difficult, and the exact percentage of water loss due to pilferage and leakage will be known when the long drawn out process of water audit is completed.
Many things have to become part of an overall, sustainable water management strategy. The service level benchmarking concept needs to be followed effectively for each city. A well structured urban water policy has to be in position. Supply sources, assured bulk availability, commitments to steadily bring down wastage levels, incorporating environmental sustainability issues, maximum tapping of rain water, consistent ground water recharging - all these have to be part of a well structured strategy at least at state level and more specifically at the level of each city.
Examples like Tamil Nadu having legislation that makes it mandatory for every house to install a rain water harvesting system, Maharashtra having a fifteen-year Sujal Nirmal Abhiyan that focuses on non-revenue water reduction, improving the efficiency of assets and sustainable services and moving towards world-class services, having a national water framework law in an agreed form with the states - all these are beginnings that could fit into a larger, better-structured urban water management strategy for our cities, so that we take the right steps to ensure that each city meets its basic water requirement for the next 15 to 30 years at least, without becoming a victim of deficit rainfall and depleting water levels in reservoirs.
The writer is a former secretary, urban development