Book Description

Drinking Water Supply in Hubballi-Dharwad Twin City of North Karnataka, a progressive state in South India. All over the world water is becoming a rare and precious commodity for both domestic and other chores in the context of very survival of human kind. Paradoxically, the total quantity of water on this planet has not altered much; the fresh water has been dwindling faster both in terms of quantity and quality due to rapid population growth, expanding urbanization, and mushrooming industrialization and unscientic environment management. Even the ground water is getting depleted faster and also highly contaminated. This has been posing a serious challenge to the local governments in providing minimum quantity of safe drinking water and the situation is getting worse in urban areas. Since water is a basic amenity and emerging as a precious commodity, governments have taken the responsibility of supplying water to their citizens. A number of schemes have been rolled out to ensure that people get minimum quantity of piped drinking water. The latest one is ensuring water all the time (24X7). Seizing the opportunity, many private players including MNCs eye on the Indian Water market. Here the Government of Karnataka has experimented it in select wards of few cities in North Karnataka and later based on the experience, has tried to replicate and scale it up to whole of selected cities. The present book is an evaluation of the experiment carried out in Hubballi- Dharwad by selecting households from the demo and non-demo zones, a semiexperimental approach has been adopted to study the technical and behavioural aspects of the respondents. The benefits of the scheme are documented convincingly, people are willing to pay higher fees for better services; minimize wastage of resources and participate in the decision-making process. This is a welcome change in the attitude of the stakeholders across different income and social classes. The model has been proved to be replicable and scalable elsewhere. But the only lacuna that could be observed is that there is no analysis on the original source of water that can be harnessed for a continuous supply. The book has many lessons for policy makers, academicians, activists and common people. The book has thrown open a number of insights that serve as reference points for policy and further research. I congratulate the authors for their painstaking effort in producing a good piece of reference book.