Swajaldhara

Reversed Realities in Rural Water Supply in India

Aim of the presentationPolitical economy of the policy making: key motivations

Political economy of the implementation: field level study

Process based studySome of the lessons / concerns that emerged

Global principles in SwajaldharaDecentralisation or the principle of

subsidiarityDemand Responsive or Bottom-up modelCommunity ownership of water resourceParticipation of womenPricing water: capital cost and O&M

Possible convergenceGlobal norms as normative orientationsSwajal /Sector Reform ProjectPolitical WillPolitical decentralization

Uttar PradeshState in the Northern

region is the second largest state.

Accounts for 16 percent of India’s population (Census 2001)

Low rate of urbanization;79.18 percent of population lives in rural areas

Classified into the underdeveloped states of India

The villages: Chaneta and Bhartaul(Bareilly District)

Important industrial district in the western zone of the state

67 percent of the population resides in the villages

Literacy rate is 47.8 percent

Bhartaul Most of the people are

agricultural labourers and some run small shops in the city or the village itself..

The main source of drinking water, prior to the scheme was the India mark hand pump that is supplied by the Jal Nigam

The poor households even today, continue to rely on the pumps that have serious quality problems

Fear of the tank closing down looms large because of the high electricity bill;t he village has defaulted on the electricity payment

ChanetaThe village has 650

households. It has a heterogeneous population and the settlements were organized along the caste lines.

The scheme was proposed in 2004-2005 and became functional in 2007.

High maintenance problems

severe water quality problems

Reality check on principlesContextualizing participation:

Information asymmetry and ‘agreed to do’

The Village Water and Sanitation Committee

Community ownershipWho owns the tank?Where was the ‘community’?

Women, Water and ParticipationWomen were identified as the key

beneficiaries of the programme (GoI, 2003).However the notion of empowerment seemed

to be absent in the official discourse of implementation of Swajaldhara.

The policy implementers, quite aware of the patriarchal context, were not very enthusiastic about the empowerment agenda within the policy.

Women were a ‘symbolic’ part of the discourse

- in a village she is someone’s mother, someone’s daughter and someone’s wife, she has no individuality of her own, her source of information is always the man of the household

Interview with Mr.Harinder Singh, Head of Abhinav NGO (25th

November, 2008).

Institutional imbroglioPerception of villagersAttitude of the Support Organisation/NGOThe attitude of the local bureaucracyParadox: Status of the SO?

IterationsHow bottom up became top down?Civil society and its accountability?the ‘uppers’ and the ‘lowers’ in the

development discourse: the idea of frames? Is financial unviability the main problem or is

there something much deeper than that? Is sustainability an economic phenomenon?

A Rights discourse in the making…Drinking water supply cannot be left to

market forces as it does not recognize the importance of providing livelihood supply to all…the commodificaton of water will shift the focus of profits to be made from the scarce resource rather than human rights to water for livelihood

(Government of India, 2009).