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Contributions from
the Column
Focus
Participation as a process
Too little attention to the aspect of legitimacy
Problems of a water supply project in India
An endeavour by terre des hommes
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Half-hearted policy – half-hearted participation
Problems of a water supply project in India
By Tillmann Elliesen
There is consensus in development cooperation that water supply projects can only be successful in the long term if the consumer participates in them. How does one achieve that? A German-Indian project in West Bengal makes clear that it is not enough to cooperate with NGOs and set up user groups. Rather, the participatory approach must be supported at all political levels.
"When the installation stopped working at one time the people were desperate. 'Take our money, but please turn on the water again,' they shouted. It was enough to make you weep," says Aloka Mitra, the head of the Indian NGO Women’s Interlink Foundation, in her office in the centre of the megacity of Calcutta with a population of 12 million. The installation Mitra speaks of is the new water supply system of Raghunathpur, a small town of about 30,000 inhabitants in the Indian Federal State of West Bengal, about 200 km/125 miles Northwest of Calcutta. The behaviour Mitra describes is astonishing. True, access to clean drinking water in India is not a matter of course. But equally it is not taken for granted there that one must pay something for water. The water utilities are state enterprises which previously charged nothing. For water has always been regarded in India as a public asset which is available for free, or that in modern society the state has to supply it at no charge.
Water in India is
traditionally a
public asset
For many Indians, however, that has remained an empty promise. About 20 per cent of the Indian rural population has no assured access to clean drinking water, and in the cities and towns the figure is 15 per cent. On the other hand, the free supply of water, where water exists, does not exactly encourage sparing use of it. On every fourth street corner in Calcutta there is a public standpipe, from which for several hours a day water gushes and flows wasted along the street.
That is to change. More than two years ago the central government in New Delhi decided on new guidelines for the national water supply policy. They provide for including the consumer more in the planning and maintenance of supply systems, delegating responsibility for water distribution to municipalities and Panchayats – village councils – and charging for it. The Indian policy thus is being adjusted in line with an international trend which began after the UN Conference on Water in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in 1977. The trend gathered pace during the International Decade on Water Supply and Sanitation (1981-1991), and was accorded programme status at the Dublin Conference on Water and the Environment in 1992. The Dublin principles include the stipulation that water supply should be organised decentrally and in a participatory way by including the users and all relevant political levels. Water was a finite resource and therefore must be recognised as an economic asset.
This model is to be implemented in Raghunathpur and in the town of Bolpur, which is two-and-a-half hours' drive away and has about 50,000 inhabitants. There, with the support of the German Development Bank, the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW), the West Bengal government has built two drinking water systems to supply a total of about 350,000 people in the two towns and the surrounding areas, mainly via public standpipes. Making the consumers aware that they are jointly responsible for the functioning of the systems, and that water is a scarce resource which costs something, is the task of Mitra's Women’s Interlink Foundation and two other NGOs which cooperate in the German-Indian project.
At first sight, it all appears to work well. The systems were opened officially in the spring of 2002, and in both Bolpur and Raghunathpur the West Bengal Public Health and Engineering Department (PHED), which has ultimate responsibility, has in the meantime handed over competence for water distribution to the municipalities and the Panchayats. The consumers have teamed up in user groups, which in Bolpur have begun to collect charges for the water, and in Raghunathpur they are preparing to do so. For Aloka Mitra the project is a complete success: "The people understand what the new water brings them, such as that the children are ill less often. And they are also prepared to pay for that."
"The people understand
that clean water
prevents diseases"
But, on-site, it becomes clear that it is not so easy to change the previous practice. For instance, in both project areas it is noticeable that at many public standpipes there are no taps or they are faulty, and that water continually runs out of them. The task of the user groups cared for by the NGOs is to see to that. For the consumers should feel responsible for 'their' supply system. They should carry out small repairs on their own and not, as before, merely see themselves as passive recipients of a state service. But that functions not nearly as well as it should. Certainly, the user groups present themselves as always perfectly organised. But when asked what is to be done in the case of a standpipe fault they give contradictory answers which make clear that basically they do not know.
It is also unclear how widespread and, above all, stable, is the people's willingness to pay for the water. At a user meeting in a small village about 15 km/9 miles from Raghunathpur, the women present confirmed through the interpreter, as expected, that they were for water charges because, after all, they were in their interest. Whereupon a young man with a good command of English said he lived there and knew the people well. We should not take what the women said at face value. "I fear," he said, "that as soon as the care of the user groups ceases the people will no longer pay."
Why is that? Actually, the state water authorities themselves had from the start objections against imposing charges for water. The word is that it is akin to a revolution in India, and all the more so in communist-governed West Bengal. As a result of these reservations the charges for the next five years were set at a level which at best will cover 60 per cent of the costs for operation and maintenance of the systems in the project areas. This is not enough to achieve the declared goal of winding down the state subsidiaries for water while offering the consumers ensured access to drinking water. Furthermore, how keenly the water authorities are at all interested in the participation of the people is in doubt. A member of the project staff says: "If the German donors had not insisted on it, then the PHED would never have let itself in for it." The authorities, he said, were interested mainly in the "beautiful new technology". But identification with the project goals and commitment to them could only trickle down to the grassroots and the consumers if the participatory approach was supported at all political levels.
The political level
has reservations
about water charges
The local administration is of decisive significance. For it is the interface between the project implementing organisations, the West Bengal government and the consumers. Whether the consumers are satisfied with the supply and prepared to engage themselves - meaning paying charges and taking care of small repairs on their own – depends on the willingness and capacities of the administrations in Bolpur and Raghunathpur, as well as that of the rural Panchayats, to manage the new water supply system efficiently. And doubts arise here, too - which are nurtured by a visit to the office of the Mayor of Bolpur. "We have everything under control, says Milan Krishna Singh. "We are well prepared for our task." That this is not right is no secret. For otherwise the project cooperation of German financial expert Friedrich Seute would not have had to be extended by one year. Seute's task is to advise the administration in the project area on the building of management capacities, which are indispensable for a smooth and above all break-even distribution of the water.
"It is not that the local administration is unwilling to assume responsibility," he says. "Rather, the problem is a glaring lack of well-trained staff with sufficient business management and economic knowledge. Given the wages that are paid here it is impossible to hire qualified staff, particularly in the country." The result is an insufficient institutional anchoring of the project in the administration. Mayor Krishna Singh points to the newly-established water cell in his town hall. But he has to concede that its staff in no way have special qualifications for their new task, and that they also have to continue to take care of their usual business areas. Another obstacle is political structures which hinder cooperation between the water authorities and the local administration. For it is not the PHED that has the political authority to issue directives to the local level, but the Department for Municipal Affairs. And it has even less interest and understanding than the PHED for the requirements of a water supply system which is designed to be participatory and economically sustainable.
The question of the charges which the consumers should pay is a good example of how incompetence and carelessness in the local administration counteract the participation of the people. As at Federal State level, there are also political reservations about water charges at the local level – they could make one unpopular with the voters. In the project area, where this May local elections were to be held, the charges were an election campaign issue and votes were sought with the promise of free water. But without charges the municipalities and Panchayats cannot pay for either the maintenance of the system or the water consumed, for which the water authority will bill them. The authority has already drawn its conclusion from that, so allows the water to flow through the pipelines for only a few hours two to three times a day instead of throughout the day, as was originally planned. Many consumers are disappointed by that, which in turn has a negative impact on their paying behaviour. This is a vicious circle which in Raghunathpur in January brought the entire system to a standstill. The PHED had to shut down the water treatment plant because due to a lack of money transfers from the local administration it could not pay its electricity bill.
Participation cannot be
implemented as easily as
for other project goals
The German-Indian cooperation in West Bengal makes clear that participation and ownership cannot be implemented as easily as for other, purely technical, project goals. The participation of the people is not guaranteed in advance by the fact that one cooperates with NGOs and water user groups. Rather, some fundamental conditions must be fulfilled to ensure participation in water supply projects.
First, there must be a sufficiently large demand among consumers. In the Indian Federal State of Rajasthan the KfW is promoting a project with a design similar to that in West Bengal. There, according to the KfW, participation of the people is much better, which could be explained by the fact that they depend much more upon their new system than do those in West Bengal. Without doubt, the clean 'German water', as it is called in Bolpur and Raghunathpur, also means progress for the people in the West Bengal project area. It is manifested by, for example, a decline in illnesses caused by drinking contaminated water. But at least in Bolpur and the surrounding area, although less so in Raghunathpur, the people do not appear to have really suffered from a lack of water before the system was started up. In a village on the outskirts of Bolpur the old, rusty hand pumps which stand in every second garden are in continual use, while the brand-new project pump at the entrance to the village merely serve as play equipment for some children. And in the Bolpur municipality the new standpipes compete with those of an older pipeline system which was installed 20 years ago but is now to be disconnected in a bid to persuade the inhabitants to use the new system. A project employee said it could not, of course, be excluded that political considerations had also played a role with the Indian partner when Bolpur, an important cultural centre in West Bengal, was selected as the project location.
Second, participation can be achieved only if all political levels involved in the project and all other actors are willing and able to contribute to it. Moreover, all participants must have contact with each other and communication between them must work. For instance, in the project in West Bengal it has been a disadvantage so far that there is no institutionalised cooperation between the consumers and the local administration by which the users' wishes and complaints can be aired. That is to change. Bill Cummings, an ethnologist who in the project supports the NGOs and user groups, reports that currently there are thoughts on representations of the user groups in the administrative departments responsible for water supply. Cummings also argues that the project work should not focus solely on the poorest people. He says greater efforts must be made to win over better-off classes as well for cooperation in the user groups. That can also boost the influence of the consumers on the local bureaucracy, he adds.
Break-even charges
and social acceptability
are compatible
Third, there must be a transparent and fair charges system. The consumers must be able to understand what is done with their money. In countries such as India, where drinking water has previously been provided free by the state, charges could perhaps be asserted more easily if they were raised not for the water itself but for maintenance and operation of the system. In addition, charges should be based upon actual consumption, not levied as a lump sum, in order to promote a sparing use of water, and the revenue should if possible cover all costs. The charges system should be fair in the sense that the rates should rise in line with the income of the consumers. Advisor Friedrich Seute, who has worked in many other water supply projects around the world, is convinced that by means of a well-considered charges system, in which the better-off consumer pays higher rates and thereby subsidises the poorer, social acceptability and full coverage of costs can be achieved.
Fourth, to establish participation and ownership calls for staying power – particularly in an environment which, as in India, is marked by strict hierarchical structures in politics and society. Actually, the West Bengal project, begun in 1996, should have been completed by the end of 2002. But Friedrich Seute and Bill Cummings are now being paid for more than a year longer than planned, and also receive staff support. Experience of comparable water supply projects teaches that consultancy for local administrations and support of the consumers often is discontinued too soon. Basically, the real work starts only after the ceremonial inauguration of the technical infrastructure.
Tillmann Elliesen is an editor of E+Z and D+C. tillmann.elliesen@fsd.de
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