It documents the approaches in a context where the state government agencies responsible for construction and management of rural water supply systems have been found to be facing limitations in O&M arrangements.
The traditional approach to provision of rural water supply in India has been supply driven, with emphasis on norms and targets and on construction and creation of assets, but with very little concern for sustainable arrangements for better management and maintenance of the facilities built. The viewpoint that users are ‘beneficiaries’ rather than empowered stakeholders among the service providers has led to alienation of the users.
This Community Driven Development (CDD) approach promotes active participation of users, and key decision-making by local governments, with the expectation that this will lead to sustainability. In this approach, users themselves undertake project construction and management through a representative committee that may or may not be formally part of the panchayat system.The justification for this approach is that if the user and provider are one, accountability is automatically assured. However, this approach has its limitations. For example,
Therefore, for states that try to upscale reforms, there is a need to explore alternate options for management of the assets and service provision, while ensuring accountability of the provider to the user.
This note documents some of the alternate approaches that are already in practice in various parts of Maharashtra, where the state is currently in the process of scaling up reforms in the rural water sector. Four different approaches to managing operations and management of rural water supply systems are represented by the schemes described in this note. The schemes covered include three single-village schemes (SVS) and two multi-village regional systems.