Water is increasingly becoming a major concern owing to fast depletion of water resources. These concerns are likely to get compounded in the context of likely future changes in climate, growing population, industrialization and increasing domestic household demands. Therefore, using water efficiently shall be part of the solution to water dilemma. Water use efficiency programme helps in meeting water resource challenges of the future. Demands of new water supplies have not kept pace with rate of demand growth. Many areas are already facing water supply infra-structure challenges. Some systems are facing seasonal demand that approaches limits of their available raw water supply while others are limited by watershed capacity during low rainfall periods while still others are limited by inadequate system capacity to meet peak demands.
Industry and Water Use
Rapid pace of industrialization in fast emerging economies, including India, is likely to put additional pressure on already depleting water resources. The industrial sector is expected to replace agriculture sector, which has traditionally been the biggest user of water. According to recent World Bank estimates, water requirement for industrial use will quadruple from the current 30 billion cubic meters to 120 billion cubic meters by 2025. The UNDP’s World Water Development Report of 2003 had estimated that in 2003, industry accounted for 22% of global freshwater consumption and by 2025 that percentage was expected to double. Further, most of the increase in industrial water use is likely to happen in fast-developing countries like India. And as manufacturing industries migrate to developing countries, the pressure on the water sources of those countries will only intensify. According to Arjun Thapan, special senior advisor on water and infrastructure to the Asian Development Bank, India’s demand for water in 2030 is estimated to be about doubled that of China’s: 1,500 billion cubic meters compared to 818 billion cubic meters in China.
In the wake of growing pressures from water experts, a segment of Indian industries has started to transform the way it uses and re-uses its own water supplies. According to a recent published in Livwmint, Car maker Maruti Suzuki India Ltd at its Gurgaon site launched a waste water programme in the early 1990s and achieved a zero-waste discharge by 2003. That means no water leaves the site in; all water used there, be it effluent, sewage or rainwater is cleaned and pumped back into the system. The other industries need to emulate the Maruti-Suzuki model in ensuring water use efficiency. The industry should develop on-site pre-treatment facilities to treat and reuse the waste it generates. This would help reduce the reliance on groundwater, a particularly stressed water source in the megacities and industrial zones.
Urban water crisis and sustainable supply
Rapid pace of urbanization in cities/towns of India call for radical reform of urban infrastructure to keep up the momentum of India’s economic growth. Reform of the water supply sector is particularly urgent. Urban population, especially the poor, spend significant portions of their time and income coping with the health and financial costs , depriving themselves of their full economic, social and civic potential.
Water is a local issue with predominantly local solutions, but failure to tackle them successfully can have regional and national implications. Reforms must be properly sequenced and managed, applying key lessons from reforms in other sectors. The private sector has a positive role to play in this process. As urban reforms in India are state subjects, the Central Government, can facilitate the reform process through its various ministries/departments, which can also provide the overall framework for official support. The Union Government has established the City Challenge Fund and the Pooled-Finance Mechanism to catalyze urban change through active partnership with states and their towns or cities using a combination of strategic engagements, capacity and regulatory support, and fiscal incentives. The Urban Reform Incentive Fund can complement these new initiatives.
A clearly articulated State urban water supply, institutional and policy framework, underpinned by enabling laws and a realistic implementation plan, would permit systematic reform and help insulate reforms from the vagaries of the political process. Drafted in consultation with key stakeholders, State sector policy and implementation plan should also advance implementation of the 74th Constitutional Amendment to devolve responsibility for urban WSS services to ULBs. Implementation should be supported by necessary incentives, instruments and assistance to fulfill both social and economic dimensions of water and sanitation services. A publicly endorsed policy framework that embraces private sector participation would provide a broad mandate for systematic reform.
The policy framework should address the predominant problems of urban water services’ opaque decision-making and accountability, intermittent and irregular supply, inefficient and inequitable allocation and utilization of resources, low tariffs and high levels of fiscal dependence, poor responsiveness to consumer needs, and high coping costs borne by consumers, particularly the poor.
Managing Pollution Control
Viewed in a broad perspective, power plants, industries and vehicles are the biggest sources of pollution. The rapid pace with which industrialization, power generation, motorization and urbanization is taking place, the pollution levels are bound to increase manifold unless major efforts are made to control it by carefully taking an environment-friendly path. Unlike the western countries, where concern for clean environment started gathering momentum during the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, India still lags behind in that realm. And this lag can be explained for three key reasons. In the first place, pollution control has yet to become an electoral issue in India. Political parties in India seldom show any serious interest in controlling pollution. They lack clear-cut strategy to take on the big polluters – the corporate sector, which too has shown a singular lack of interest in controlling pollution.
Despite the stringent measures enacted by the Government, many of the government’s own companies and power stations continue to be heavy polluters. Secondly, pollution control calls for observance of discipline and effective regulation. Given the state of political and bureaucratic corruption, again it is extremely unlikely that pollution control laws will be enforced with any level of effectiveness. Thirdly, pollution control requires heavy investment for which government endeavours alone are insufficient and private sector should come forward to invest in pollution-control related projects.
Management of pollution control is not an easy task and it requires concerted efforts and involvement of all segments of the society to effect the changes in the existing system which has been slow in dealing with the problem of pollution. Apart from the legislative measures enacted by the central and state governments from time to time with regard to pollution control, involvement of people at all levels in the management of pollution control is of equal significance.
As pollution affects every segment of society, hence its solution also lies in making it a mass movement in which people are involved from the decision-making level to implementation levels as well. The Pollution Control Boards, both at the Central Government level and State Government levels, should increase the pollution monitoring units in the cities to monitor air quality and water quality. Besides, these monitoring units should be equipped with latest monitoring mechanism. The following additional suggestions also merit consideration and speedy implementation.
- Pollution should be made a people’s movement in which general public should participate at local level to oversee that official agencies entrusted with the task of maintaining quality of water are discharging their duties properly.
- Some sort of financial relief should be provided to private sector firms participating in the pollution control related measures in order to motivate them. Such a measure would reduce the burden on government exchequer and it can ensure forging of cooperation between the government and private sector in managing the pollution control.
- Voluntary organizations should be involved in managing pollution control. These organizations can be entrusted the task of making the people aware about the nature and magnitude of the problem of pollution and the means of managing it.
- A nodal agency under the Union Ministry of Environment should be set up to coordinate with the state governments and NGOs engaged in managing pollution control to prepare informative literature on different aspects of pollution as well as containing short-term remedial measures in vernacular languages for disbursement among the people.
- Extensive use of mass media, especially the Doordarshan and private TV channels should be made to disseminate the message of pollution control. Simple precautionary measures to be taken by the public should be highlighted.
- Heavy monetary fines should be imposed on vehicles, industries and other units found flouting environmental norms.
Public-Public Partnership
The vast majority of public service operators in the world are in the public sector and 90 per cent of all major cities are served by such bodies. In other words, the largest pool of experience and expertise, and the great majority of examples of good practice and sound institutions, are to be found in existing public sector. Because they are public sector, however, they do not have any natural commercial incentive to provide international support. Their incentive stems from solidarity, not profit. Since 1990, however, the policies of international donors and development banks have focused on the private companies and their incentives. The vast resources of the public sector have been overlooked, even blocked by pro-private policies.
Out of sight of these global policy-makers, however, a growing number of public sector companies have been engaged, in a great variety of ways, in helping others develop the capacity to be effective and accountable public services. These supportive arrangements are now called “public-public partnerships” (PUPs). A public-public partnership (PUP) is simply collaboration between two or more public authorities or organisations, based on solidarity, to improve the capacity and effectiveness of one partner in providing public water or sanitation services. They have been described by Lobina and Hall as: “a peer relationship forged around common values and objectives, which exclude profit-seeking”. Neither partner expects a commercial profit, directly or indirectly.
Active involvement of the private players can be utilized for the betterment of the society through improved water and sanitation facilities. Besides, involvement of private players will induce international companies as well as financial institutions like World Bank, International Financial Corporation, and Asian Development Bank etc., to extend requisite loans to facilitate import required technology and expertise essential for water treatment and sanitation facilities.
There lurk some apprehensions in some quarters about the price factor and this issue can be addressed by mutual consultations and subsidies to be provided by the government as well as Indian corporate sector as a part of its CSR obligation. It is advisable that at this critical juncture when water shortage is affecting a large majority of the Indian people, such misapprehensions should be disallowed to hamper the water and sanitation projects.
Keeping in view the social and potentially a sensitive nature of water reforms in India, privatization of water is less willingly appreciated. But things are changing gradually and a few major public private partnership projects involving government agencies and Indian and foreign private companies are being implemented. There is a need to educate the public about the utilities of public-private partnership in the water sector. At the same time, there is also a need for increased interaction between the public and private sectors with regard to water.
Main guidelines for State water sector policy to be founded on the key principles of:
- Public service obligations and institutional accountability, beginning with an institutional separation of operational aspects of service provision from policy-making and regulation
- Financial sustainability, with tariffs progressively moving towards covering prudently-incurred costs, while ensuring that low income and vulnerable consumers also benefit from service improvements and targeted subsidies enable them to afford at least a basic level of service
- Autonomous and competent regulation
- Appropriate forms of private sector participation
- Incentives to improve services for the poor
- A competitive market for high cost/high value inputs – civil works, equipment, labor, electricity, financing, etc.
Decision Making Mechanism
Implementation and sequencing of the state’s water sector policy would require taking into account the administrative capacity, political will and financial constraints of individual states and ULBs. A common feature of successful reform programs has been top-level political leadership, with execution of the reform process entrusted to an empowered reform team. It is suggested to the State governments to create the enabling legal, regulatory and sector/industry structure, which would need to:
- Create a Reform Facilitation Team to draft legislation to support water sector policy, and help ULBs to implement reforms;
- Build regulatory capacity on which ULBs can draw to commercialize WSS services, benchmark utility performance, design and execute PSP transactions, and manage public-private partnerships;
- Create a competitive market for sector inputs such as engineering and construction services, labor, electricity, etc. and allow utilities to phase in competitive procurement from the private sector;
- Guide the creation of regional water utilities and provide incentives to help small towns attract the resources needed to improve services in a cost-effective manner; and
- Develop financing mechanisms to cover transition costs; link budget transfers and other incentives to achievement of reform targets; and promote public-private partnerships by making them an intrinsic part of ULB reform plans and guaranteeing contractual obligations of ULBs in a Public-Private Partnership and Public-Public partnership arrangements.
Advance knowledge of problems facing water sector in India and their remedial measures taken in this regard are somewhat scattered and least known out of the region/town , It needs to highlights these aspects for synchronization of available facts and develop suitable policy framework accordingly. Contents suggested in the politico-legal policy framework for reform in water sector in order to attain sustainable growth and these suggestions are practically applicable. The procedures and practices suggested having the definite potential of replicability in other areas once these have been applied in one town or area.
Keeping in view the importance of infrastructure for sustained economic development, the Government of India is investing over one trillion US dollars in developing the infrastructure to achieve 9 per cent growth in the 12th five year plan. The private sector has a potential to play an important role in development of rural infrastructure, which will also save cost overruns. Besides, infusion of private capital will ease the pressure on limited resources and improve the efficiency of service delivery. Water sector constitutes about one-third of this infrastructure development.
The efficacy of private sector participation in infrastructure development would be contingent upon the capability to commercialize these projects whereby recovery of investments would be through a system of user charges. There is a potential for public private partnerships (PPPs) to contribute more and help bridge the infrastructure gap in India. The increasing role of private sector in infrastructure development means rapid expansion of industrial base and resultant additional pressure on already depleting water resources. The industrial sector in India is required to meet strict water quality guidelines to ensure product quality as well and meet ever increasing industrial wastewater regulations, while improving efficiency and reducing waste disposal costs.
