Rural Water Systems for Multiple Uses and Livelihood Security

Rural Water Systems for Multiple Uses and Livelihood Security

Editors

M. Dinesh Kumar

Institute for Resource Analysis and Policy, Hyderabad, India

A.J. James

Institute of Development Studies, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India

Yusuf Kabir

UNICEF Office for Maharashtra, Mumbai, India

Table of Contents

Cover image

Title page

Copyright

List of Contributors

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1. Introduction

1.1. Context

1.2. Rationale for the Book

1.3. A Normative Framework for Analyzing the Performance of Multiple-Use Water Systems

1.4. Scope of the Book

Chapter 2. Water, Human Development, Inclusive Growth, and Poverty Alleviation: International Perspectives

2.1. Introduction

2.2. Objectives, Hypothesis, Methods, and Data Sources

2.3. The Global Debate on Water, Development, and Growth

2.4. Water and Inclusive Growth

2.5. Impact of Storage Development on Economic Growth in Arid Tropics

2.6. Impact of Storage Development on Malnutrition and Child Mortality

2.7. Multiple-Use Water Systems for All-Round Water Security in Rural Areas

2.8. Summary, Conclusions, and Policy

Chapter 3. Multiple Water Needs of Rural Households: Studies From Three Agro-Ecologies in Maharashtra

3.1. Introduction

3.2. Selection of Villages From Three Agro-Ecologies in Maharashtra

3.3. Socioeconomic Details of Rural Households in the Selected Regions

3.4. Multiple Water Needs of Rural Households in the Selected Regions

3.5. Assessing the Vulnerability of Rural Households to Problems Associated With Lack of Water for Domestic and Productive Needs

3.6. Conclusion

Chapter 4. Multiple-Use Water Systems for Reducing Household Vulnerability to Water Supply Problems

4.1. Introduction

4.2. Existing Village Water Supply Systems in Three Selected Regions

4.3. Characteristics of MUWS: Findings From a Global Review

4.4. Design Considerations for MUWS for Three Regions of Maharashtra

4.5. MUWS Models for Different Regions of Maharashtra

4.6. Characteristics of Effective Micro-Level Institutions for Water: Findings From a Review

4.7. Institutional Set up for Management of MUWS

4.8. Conclusions

Chapter 5. Sustainability Versus Local Management: Comparative Performance of Rural Water Supply Schemes

5.1. Introduction

5.2. Objectives and Methodology

5.3. Rural Water Supply Reforms in Maharashtra

5.4. Evolution of Techno-Institutional Setup for Water Supply Management

5.5. Performance of Rural Water Supply Schemes in Maharashtra: A Comparative Analysis

5.6. Major Findings

5.7. Conclusions and Policy Inferences

Chapter 6. Influence of Climate Variability on Performance of Local Water Bodies: Analysis of Performance of Tanks in Tamil Nadu

6.1. Introduction

6.2. Tank Irrigation in Tamil Nadu

6.3. Climate Variability and Tank Performance

6.4. Impact of Climate Variability on Tank-Based Agriculture

6.5. Coping and Adaptation Strategies

6.6. Conclusion and Policies

Chapter 7. Groundwater Use and Decline in Tank Irrigation? Analysis From Erstwhile Andhra Pradesh

7.1. Introduction

7.2. Cause of Decline of Tanks: Contested Terrains?

7.3. Need for Postulating an Alternative Hypothesis on Tank Degradation

7.4. Tank Management Programme in Erstwhile Andhra Pradesh

7.5. Research Objectives, Approach, Methodology, and Data Sources

7.6. Results and Discussion

7.7. Findings

7.8. Conclusions and Policy Recommendations

Chapter 8. Reducing Vulnerability to Climate Variability: Forecasting Droughts in Vidarbha Region of Maharashtra, Western India

8.1. Rationale

8.2. Current Approaches to Drought Forecasting

8.3. Project Goals and Objectives

8.4. Features of the Project Area

8.5. Project Approach

8.6. Setting up of DST

8.7. Conclusions and Areas for Future Work

Chapter 9. Sustainable Access to Treated Drinking Water in Rural India

9.1. Introduction

9.2. India Water Landscape: Challenges and Emerging Trends

9.3. Growing Need for Treated Drinking Water in Rural Areas

9.4. The Evolving Policy Framework and Public Initiatives

9.5. Challenge of Sustaining Services and Ensuring Quality

9.6. The Possible Commercial Solution

9.7. Sustainability of Treated Drinking Water Systems

Chapter 10. Positive Externalities of Surface Irrigation on Farm Wells and Drinking Water Supplies in Large Water Systems: The Case of Sardar Sarovar Project

10.1. Introduction

10.2. Positive Externalities of Gravity Irrigation From Large Water Systems

10.3. Study Location, Methods, and Data

10.4. Changes in Groundwater Availability and Quality in the SSP Command Area

10.5. Social Benefits From Narmada Canal Irrigation

10.6. Findings and Conclusions

Chapter 11. Re-Imagining the Future: Experiencing Sustained Drinking Water for All

11.1. Introduction

11.2. Village Water Management: Local Ingenuity Meets Supportive Government

11.3. Building Support for Change

11.4. Co-managing Water Resources

11.5. Competing to Reduce Groundwater Extraction

11.6. Water Shares for Greater Stakes

11.7. Tankas to Shore up Domestic Supplies

11.8. Working within Water Discharge Limits

11.9. The Water Fund for Sustainability

11.10. Local Variations on A Common Theme

11.11. The District Picture: Modern Science Meets Smart Governance

11.12. The Five Pillars of Change

11.13. State Institutions: Visioning a New Reality

11.14. Supporting Community Management through Laws

11.15. Integrating the Water Institutions

11.16. Conclusions

Chapter 12. Building Resilient Rural Water Systems Under Uncertainties

12.1. Resilient Multiple-Use Water Systems: Summary of Evidence From Different Types of Systems

12.2. Planning of Resilient Rural Water Systems for Multiple Uses

12.3. Management of Rural Water Systems for Multiple Uses

12.4. Institutions and Policies

Index

Copyright

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List of Contributors

S. Bandyopadhyay,     Associate Professor, School of Ecology and Environment Studies, Nalanda University, Rajgir, Bihar, India

N. Bassi,     Institute for Resource Analysis and Policy, Delhi, India

S. Deshpande,     Groundwater Surveys and Development Agency, Pune, Maharashtra, India

J.D. Foster,     Chestertown Spy, Chestertown, MD, United States

S. Jagadeesan,     Former Managing Director, Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam Ltd, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India

A.J. James,     Institute of Development Studies, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India

Y. Kabir,     UNICEF Office for Maharashtra, Mumbai, India

D.S. Kumar,     Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore, India

M.D. Kumar,     Institute for Resource Analysis and Policy, Hyderabad, India

V. Niranjan,     Engineering & Research International LLC, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

R.M. Saleth,     Madras School of Economics, Chennai, India

M.V.K. Sivamohan,     Institute for Resource Analysis and Policy, Hyderabad, India

N. Vedantam,     Engineering & Research International LLC, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Preface

The idea of a book on rural water systems for multiple uses came towards the end of 2012 when Institute for Resource Analysis and Policy (IRAP)-Hyderabad, UNICEF-Mumbai, and the Groundwater Survey and Development Agency (GSDA)-Pune, Maharashtra, completed a collaborative action research project titled Multiple Use Water Services to Reduce Poverty and Vulnerability Climate Variability and Change. Several subsequent studies reinforced the finding, which emerged from the Maharashtra study, that many rural water systems—either those meant for irrigation or domestic water supply—serve multiple purposes, depending on the socioeconomic characteristics of the population in the area in which those systems are embedded or its physical environment, defined by hydrology, geo-hydrology, and climate—which is a function of the year and the season. They also showed that the uses of a rural water system can change from year to year, depending on whether it was wet or dry. It can change from the rainy season to summer.

The question was about evolving appropriate technical and socioeconomic considerations for planning and design in order to build resilient multiple-use rural water systems, and crafting institutions and framing policies for their management to meet the domestic and productive water needs, in terms of quantity, quality, and reliability. This required empirical analysis of the performance of different types of multiple-use rural water systems, which are either designed as multiple-use systems or are by default functioning as multiple-use systems, in different physical and socioeconomic settings.

Most of the earlier work on multiple-use water services essentially comprised of theoretical and descriptive work, and lacked empirical analysis of their performance. This book collates experience from different parts of India, representing different agro-ecological and socioeconomic situations, with multiple-use rural water services from different types of socio-technical systems, rural drinking water schemes—single-village and multiple-village schemes, large multipurpose water systems, irrigation tanks—to identify the conditions under which their sustainability is threatened vis-à-vis their ability to meet the domestic and productive water needs of the rural people, which in turn helped us identify the factors that are critical to designing resilient rural water systems. Subsequently, the critical inputs for planning and management of rural water systems for multiple uses, and the institutional and policy regimes that enable enhanced performance are identified.

This volume has compiled, edited and synthesized the works of several scholars from across India, representing several unique physical and socioeconomic environments, which are the outcome of several years of thinking or empirical research or practical experience, on improving the performance of rural water systems in order for them to cater to the multiple needs of the people for survival and livelihoods. We are extremely thankful to the contributors for their invaluable works, their timely submissions of manuscripts, and the patience they have shown in responding to the editorial queries.

The chapters (2–11) presented in this volume were outputs of projects undertaken by the respective scholars, either with financial support from external agencies in most cases, or/and the organizations for which they worked, in the rest of the cases. The most prominent among them are the UNICEF-Mumbai office, Sir Ratan Tata Trust-Mumbai, Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam Ltd, International Water Management Institute (IWMI), Colombo, GSDA, and IRAP. Chapter Water, Human Development, Inclusive Growth, and Poverty Alleviation: International Perspectives is based on empirical research done by its lead author during his association with IWMI during 2007–08, which was extended and built on during his work at IRAP. Four of the subsequent chapters (chapters: Multiple Water Needs of Rural Households: Studies From Three Agro-Ecologies in Maharashtra,Multiple-Use Water Systems for Reducing Household Vulnerability to Water Supply Problems, Sustainability Versus Local Management: Comparative Performance of Rural Water Supply Schemes, and Reducing Vulnerability to Climate Variability: Forecasting Droughts in Vidarbha Region of Maharashtra, Western India) are based on the outcomes of two studies undertaken by IRAP, with financial support from UNICEF, one on multiple-use water services in three regions of Maharashtra (chapters: Multiple Water Needs of Rural Households: Studies From Three Agro-Ecologies in Maharashtra, and Multiple-Use Water Systems for Reducing Household Vulnerability to Water Supply Problems) and the other on development of a decision support tool for drought predictions in Chandrapur district of Maharashtra (chapter: Reducing Vulnerability to Climate Variability: Forecasting Droughts in Vidarbha Region of Maharashtra, Western India), done in collaboration with GSDA, and a third study on designing institutional and policy regimes for sustainable rural water supplies in Maharashtra, undertaken by IRAP independently, with financial support from UNICEF (chapter: Sustainability Versus Local Management: Comparative Performance of Rural Water Supply Schemes).

Chapter "Influence of Climate Variability on Performance of Local Water Bodies: Analysis of Performance of Tanks in Tamil Nadu on Tamil Nadu tanks was based on a study entitled Climate Variability and Tank Irrigation Management in Tamil Nadu: An Economic Inquiry into Impacts, Adaptation, Issues and Policies done under a research grant from the State Planning Commission, Government of Tamil Nadu, Chennai. Chapter Groundwater Use and Decline in Tank Irrigation? Analysis from Erstwhile Andhra Pradesh on tanks in Andhra Pradesh was based on a research study undertaken by IRAP, with a small grant from Sir Ratan Tata Trust, Mumbai. The work on safe drinking water was the outcome of a study undertaken by the concerned researcher in Safe Water Network, India. Chapter Positive Externalities of Surface Irrigation on Farm Wells and Drinking Water Supplies in Large Water Systems: The Case of Sardar Sarovar Project" on positive externalities of canal irrigation on well irrigation and drinking water supplies came out of an SSNNL-sponsored study carried out by IRAP to analyze the social and economic benefits of Sardar Sarovar Project. We are extremely grateful to these organizations for their valuable support and for allowing the authors concerned to contribute the outcomes of those projects to this volume for the benefit of the scholars, academics, and policymakers and development practitioners internationally.

M.D. Kumar

Y. Kabir

A.J. James

Editors

Acknowledgments

The editors are thankful to the five reviewers, who have gone through the book proposal, and the editorial office of Elsevier Science, who have gone through the sample chapters, for offering invaluable comments and suggestions, which have immensely helped in framing the questions which the volume addresses, and enhancing the value of this volume. We sincerely hope the current volume titled Rural Water Systems for Multiple Uses and Livelihood Security will raise the level of international debate on building sustainable rural water systems for domestic and productive needs in developing countries, by enabling them to factor in the key physical and socioeconomic, institutional and policy factors that characterize water resource development, use, and management in the rural areas of those countries, in deciding on the quantity and quality of water, operational rules, and technical infrastructure for the options being considered.

Chapter 1

Introduction

M.D. Kumar     Institute for Resource Analysis and Policy, Hyderabad, India

Y. Kabir     UNICEF Field Office, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

A.J. James     Institute of Development Studies, Jaipur, India

Abstract

The book is about building resilient rural water systems for multiple-use services that are sustainable. It provides a nuanced understanding of the multiple water needs of rural communities; how these needs change in quantitative terms across agro climatic and socioeconomic settings; the multiple benefits that traditional rural water systems provide; conditions under which these traditional systems can be rehabilitated for enhancing their benefits; how modern water systems can be designed and built as multiple-use water systems (MUWSs); and how to maximize the various social, economic and environmental benefits for them to become multiple-use systems.

The book begins with this chapter on a normative framework for assessing the performance of MUWSs under two situations: first, where an existing ‘single-use system’ is converted into a ‘multiple-use system’ through retrofitting; and, second, where a new water system is designed as a multiple-use system. The chapter also outlines the scope of the book.

Keywords

India; Modern water systems; Performance assessment; Resilient rural water systems; Traditional water systems

1.1. Context

A large proportion of the world’s population are without access to safe water for drinking lives in India. In spite of huge public investments in water supply, India has made limited progress in improving access to safe water in rural areas in terms of physical access, quality, adequacy, reliability, and dependability. While the Economic Survey of 2013–14 found that more than 80% of the rural population has access to safe water for drinking through taps, bore wells, tube wells, or hand pumps (MoHA, 2014), only a little over 30% of households had access to tap water in their dwelling premises as per the 2011 Census. In addition, access to supply, as it is defined today, requires only physical proximity to water infrastructure— regardless of whether it provides adequate amount of water or not (see, WHO/UNICEF, 2011). Therefore, these figures, while hiding considerable regional and local variations in drinking water availability, endorse the anecdotal evidence of women walking for miles during summer months in semiarid India to fetch water and having to dig river beds to strain pitiful amounts of drinking water.

This situation is in sharp contrast to the growing water use in irrigation, with the country becoming the largest user of irrigation water in the world, with around 97  m  ha of crop land being watered (Kumar et al., 2012a). Planning and execution of modern rural water supply systems without due consideration to the physical and environmental sustainability of the resource base, real water needs of rural households, the actual cost of operation and maintenance of the system, and of the institutional capacities required to manage the systems, are major reasons for this dichotomy. Rural water supply sources often become defunct, or their supply levels drop or the quality of water from these sources deteriorates, with the result that there is heavy slippage.

With the advent of reforms in the rural water and sanitation sectors, the past one-and-a-half decades have seen governments overemphasizing decentralized schemes. To enable the community to plan, implement and manage their own water supply systems, as part of the paradigm shift, the government of India wants the states to transfer the program to the Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs), particularly to the Gram Panchayats for the management of water supply within the village (MoRD, 2010). Hence, the focus has been on hand pumps and small groundwater-based village water supply schemes that the Panchayats could run. The fact that water scarcity concerns problems with allocation more than overall physical availability of water and that there are competing demands for water in rural areas is hardly taken into consideration while promoting such schemes. Hence, these schemes have poor dependability, and failure of schemes due to drying up of sources is also rampant. There is little recognition of the fact that rural communities, particularly poor rural households, have multiple water needs—domestic and productive.

Traditional water supply systems such as tanks, ponds, open wells, and lakes from a variety of physical and environmental settings—from humid and subhumid subtropical regions to arid tropics—are used to meet the multiple water needs of rural India, including drinking and cooking, water for personal hygiene (washing, bathing, sanitation), livestock drinking, and recreation (Agarwal and Narain, 1997). Amongst these are tanks, built centuries ago by zamindars (feudal landlords) and kings, and by the British Government in India during the 18th and 19th centuries. They are concentrated in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu, where they provided a major source of irrigation until the mid-1960s. But these water bodies are fast degrading as a result of a variety of physical, socioeconomic, and institutional changes and the vast majority of them have gone into disuse. The declining hydrological performance of the tanks, and the implications for irrigation and associated consequences for their multiple functions from a hydrological perspective have not been thoroughly examined. Instead, an attempt has been made to attribute the declining performance of tanks to the erosion of community management structures, which were responsible for their upkeep, and subsequent management takeover by the government (eg, Pradan, 1996; Rao, 1998); the lack of interest of command area farmers in managing these common pool resources (von Oppen and Rao, 1987; Shankari, 1991; Sekar and Palanisami, 2000; Balasubramaniyam and Bromley, 2002); and to the development approach followed during the British rule centered on modern large irrigation systems with the decline of tanks (Paranjape et al., 2008).

Mosse (1999), however, challenged the long-held view of scholars working on tanks in South India that the collapse of community institutions was the major cause of decline of tanks and contends that, even in the past, communities made little investment in the upkeep of tanks. According to him, it was the zamindars and kings who not only built most of the tanks but also spent money on their upkeep and the fall of the institution of overlords led to the decline of the tanks.

Researchers and civil society organizations, however, continue to stress that traditional tanks are sustainable water supply systems, and the institutions built around them are superior to modern water institutions in terms of their effectiveness in equitable water allocation and sound water management (eg, Sakthivadivel et al., 2004; ADB, 2006), barring the exceptions of Shah (2008)¹. In parallel, there is increasing emphasis from governments, prompted by World Bank–supported tank rehabilitation projects in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, to look at the revival of traditional water systems as a substitute to building modern water systems—which involve construction of large reservoirs and canal systems—and create institutions for their management. This also suited the changing sociopolitical context, wherein the opposition to building of large water systems on social and environmental grounds grew, both nationally and internationally. Particularly, as noted by Jagadeesan and Kumar (2015), large irrigation systems based on reservoirs and canals were considered inefficient and ecologically unsustainable by social and environmental activists.

This bias against large systems and the sensitiveness of the issues associated with building large reservoirs also led to the overdependence on groundwater as a sustainable source of irrigation and drinking water supplies.

Supported by government policies, well irrigation expanded rapidly in many semiarid regions, often at the expense of the environmental and social needs of the local communities. These regions, which experienced intensive groundwater extraction for irrigation (Kumar, 2007; Kumar et al., 2012a), often suffered a severe shortage of water for drinking during summer months, as groundwater-based public drinking water sources (such as wells, tube wells, and hand pumps) dried up due to severe competition from irrigators tapping the same aquifers. Water from deep aquifers suffered from poor chemical quality (TDS and fluorides). This forced water supply agencies in some states to look for more sustainable and dependable sources of water to meet basic needs.

Despite the growing challenge of managing sustainable water supplies from groundwater-based sources, many water supply agencies and civil society groups continue to extol groundwater-based drinking water sources for virtues such as decentralized management by local communities, low cost, and equity in access to water, as against surface water-based regional water supply schemes, often criticized for their high capital and maintenance costs and poor inter-village equity in water distribution. However, apart from achieving decentralized management, concerns of intravillage equity are yet not addressed in local groundwater-based drinking water supply schemes, as the poor people in rural areas suffer the most when drinking water sources dry up during summer months, while rich households manage to access water from their own private water sources.

In spite of recognizing the severe competition that the drinking water sector faces from larger water-consuming sectors, public water utilities, which use modern water development and distribution technologies, generally design rural water supply schemes as single-use systems to meet only domestic water needs. The design of these schemes does not consider the needs of rural communities for sustainable livelihoods, and hence fails to support these communities in performing economic activities using the water supplied from such systems. As a result, these communities show a low level of willingness to pay for the water supply which, in turn, affects the sustainability of the systems as official agencies are not able to recover the costs of their operation and maintenance. Thus a vicious circle is perpetuated.

1.2. Rationale for the Book

Most developing countries had their own traditional rural water systems before modern water supply technologies were introduced. Tanks, ponds, and lakes are traditional rural water systems in India. There is a vast literature on the multiple-use benefits of wetlands, particularly tanks and lakes. Arguments are made for renovation of these water bodies for meeting multiple water needs of village communities (Paranjape et al., 2008). The government and the donors are investing billions of dollars every year in India, particularly in the southern states, to rehabilitate irrigation tanks to enhance their performance (ADB, 2006). The cost of rehabilitation was as high as Rs. 56,500 per ha for the World Bank–funded Karnataka JSYS (Jala Samvardhane Yojana Sangha) project.

The decision to invest in tank rehabilitation, however, has not yet been backed by any analysis of the hydrological factors which affect their performance. Instead, their poor performance is more often attributed to the collapse of tank management institutions. In fact, various physical and socioeconomic processes alter the hydrology of tanks in rural settings, thereby affecting their performance, and hence there is a need to evolve quantitative criteria to identify tanks that are suitable for rehabilitation so as to optimally utilize scarce financial resources.

There is, unfortunately, a conspicuous paucity of empirical analysis quantifying the various benefits of tank rehabilitation, how these benefits change with climatic variability, and how maximizing one type of benefit can affect others—issues that are critical for rational investment decision-making on renovation. Hence, there is an urgent need to: quantify these benefits from different agro ecological systems; and understand the economic and environmental tradeoffs in optimizing these benefits.

As regards modern rural water systems, there is abundant theoretical discourse on designing village water supply schemes as multiple-use systems (see inter alia, van Koppen et al., 2009). While they concern developing countries, they are quite generic and not country- or region-specific. Also, there is very little understanding of the type of water needs in rural households; how these needs vary across socioeconomic and climatic settings; the extent to which these needs are met by the existing single-use water supply schemes; and what coping mechanisms are used to address unmet demands. More empirical assessments are needed to design multiple-use water systems—including analysis of how the multiple water needs of rural communities change with agro ecology, the type of water needs for which rural communities depend on public water supply schemes; and the alternate sources used to meet various different domestic and productive water needs over different seasons in a single year.

Since there are not many multiple-use water systems (MUWSs) in existence by design, it would help rural water system managers to understand how existing public water supply schemes in rural areas can be retrofitted to augment their supply potential and to improve their dependability, and thus make them sustainable sources of water supply for domestic and productive needs. It is important to document the process of developing technical designs of multiple-use water systems for different agro ecological and socioeconomic settings. The design considerations are extremely important, and, obviously, have to be based on extensive review and synthesis of multiple-use water systems around the world, in the absence of evidence from well-functioning MUWSs in India. The cases of well-functioning MUWSs from South Asia, South-East Asia, Latin America, North and East Africa have been documented by scholars in the recent past and should be critically analyzed for use in India.

Large water systems often produce multiple-use benefits indirectly—such as through recharge to groundwater or replenishment of local wetlands, in the form of improved water supplies from existing wells, dilution of minerals in groundwater, raised water table reducing the cost of energy for pumping groundwater, and improved sustainability of well irrigation in command areas, and therefore serve as multiple-use systems. But, there is paucity of literature providing quantification of such indirect benefits from large water systems (Jagadeesan and Kumar, 2015). Conventional methodologies, which evaluate the economic benefits from large water systems, are inadequate for these and innovative methodologies are required to assess their social and environmental costs and benefits. Such methodologies need to be employed for real-life projects to demonstrate their usefulness and to estimate the relative magnitudes of indirect and direct benefits.

A nuanced and clear understanding of all these issues—the nature and relative size of multiple water needs of rural communities; how these needs change in quantitative terms across agro climatic and socioeconomic settings; what multiple benefits the traditional rural water systems produce; how these benefits vary with climate; under what conditions these systems can be rehabilitated for enhancing their benefits; how modern water systems can be designed and built as multiple-use water systems; what indirect social, economic, and environmental benefits the large modern water systems produce; and how to maximize those benefits for them to become multiple-use water systems, etc.—is necessary to design and build resilient and sustainable rural multiple-use water systems.

1.3. A Normative Framework for Analyzing the Performance of Multiple-Use Water Systems

All water systems can potentially serve multiple purposes, be it in rural areas or urban areas, as water itself has multiple roles as an economic good, a social good, and an environmental good. Unlike in developed countries, water supply services to different sectors such as irrigation, domestic water supply, livestock water supply, fisheries, and recreation, in developing countries are still not fully formalized, though the number of formal water supply systems, especially in irrigation and domestic water supply, is on the rise. There is a general tendency among rural populations in these countries, therefore, to meet water needs of one particular use from sources meant for another use. For instance, village women use running canals to wash clothes and clean vessels, and rural people in general use canal water also for bathing. The livestock-rearing community would take their animals to running canals, for feeding and often for washing them.

Rural domestic water supply systems such as hand pumps on bore wells, which are designed to meet basic survival needs (say at the rate of 40  L per capita per day), are also used to clean and water livestock and for a range of productive uses, including tea-making, kitchen gardens, vermicomposting units, and pottery (Lovell, 2000; Moriarty et al., 2004; James, 2004). In certain other situations, if the water from the source is not adequate to meet the productive water needs, which is a priority for survival and livelihoods of poor rural households, the households might spend time fetching water from other sources.

In view of the change in pattern of use from the original design, the performance of these systems needs to be assessed vis-à-vis the different types of benefits actually realized, rather than the intended benefits.

Actual benefits, however, would depend entirely on the local situation. As van Koppen et al. (2009) points out, it can result in either households not being able to realize the full potential of water as a social good or in the damage of the system. For instance, in the first case, if the water from the drinking water source is of good quality but just adequate for human consumption in the village/hamlet, then diversions for livestock and other productive uses could reduce welfare benefits: The reason is drinking water demand has the highest priority, and if such diversions deprive other households of water needed for basic survival needs, the full benefits of the social good, ie, water supply, will not be realized. Similarly, in the second case, in the stretches of canal downstream of where clothes are washed, the water will be polluted and unsuitable for livestock drinking because of the presence of detergents. Further, the continued use of canal water for washing, bathing, and animal washing could damage the canal lining, unless steps are provided for people to climb down to the water.

Households with individual water supply connections may also divert water for kitchen gardens. This would require an additional pipeline which takes water to the backyard, over and above the capital investment (for retrofitting) to get extra water from the source or from a new source. However, such diversion would be economically feasible only if the cost of supplying the additional water from the drinking water source for the kitchen garden (including the cost of additional infrastructure) is less than the cost of setting up separate infrastructure to get the same amount of water of irrigable quality.

Hence, a rural water system designed as a single-use system and converted into a multiple-use system can be said to be performing well only if the total value of the net social, economic, and environmental benefits produced from such uses exceeds the value of the net benefits from its alternative (previous or current) use.² Over and above, the process of conversion of the single-use system into a multiple-use one should not result in any compromise on the existing uses in terms of quantity and quality of water accessed and the ease with which it is accessed by different stakeholders. Therefore, any rural water system originally designed as a single-use system and now being converted into a multiple-use system should not only ensure (continued) equity of access to all stakeholders and (continued) quality of physical infrastructure but should also enhance the benefits received (including social and environmental benefits).

Performance assessment of systems designed to be "multiple-use water