Index of Drinking Water Adequacy (IDWA): International and Intra-national Exploration

1. Introduction and Motivation

Introduction and Motivation 1 1 Introduction and Motivation Bhanoji Rao and Fan Mingxuan The Index of Drinking Water Adequacy (IDWA), as its name implies, is a monitoring tool devised to assess and benchmark countries’ performance in providing adequate drinking water to their citizens. IDWA is inspired by the lack of an adequate indicator for monitoring access to drinking water of adequate quantity and quality. Rest of this chapter will focus on: (a) limitations of globally monitored indicators; (b) Water Poverty Index (WPI) and its limitations ; and finally (c) the thinking behind IDWA. Limitations of the Indicator Used for MDG Monitoring Globally, the water component of Target 10 of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) is measured as proportion of population with sustainable access to safe drinking water. WHO and UNICEF provide monitoring of progress on this target, and their definition of “sustainable access to safe drinking water” is given in Box 1. 1 2 Index of Drinking Water Adequacy (IDWA) Box 1 What does sustainable access to safe drinking water mean? The Joint Monitoring Program (JMP) of WHO and UNICEF defines safe drinking water as follows: • Drinking water is water used for domestic purposes, drinking, cooking and personal hygiene; • Access to drinking water means that the source is less than 1 kilometre away from its place of use and that it is possible to reliably obtain at least 20 litres per member of a household per day; • Safe drinking water is water with microbial, chemical and physical characteristics that meet WHO guidelines or national standards on drinking water quality; • Access to safe drinking water is the proportion of people using improved drinking water sources: household connection ; public standpipe; borehole; protected dug well; protected spring; rainwater. Source: WHO (2004). Available at Although the definition is sophisticated enough to cover four different dimensions of “access”, “proportion of people using improved drinking water source” is the only indicator applied in the actual monitoring process. The United Nations Development Group (UNDG, 2003) explained that “the indicator monitors access to improved water sources based on the assumption that improved sources are more likely to provide safe water”. UNDG further clari- fied that “access and volume of drinking water are difficult to measure and so sources of drinking water that are thought to provide safe water are used as a proxy”. Can the aforementioned argument justify the use of a single and simplistic indicator? Figure 1 shows how a group of tribal women draw water from an agricultural well at Govind Tanda in Karepalli Mandal of Khammam Introduction and Motivation 3 District, Andhra Pradesh, India. Despite the unknown quality and quantity of water they accessed and the difficulty in physically accessing water, this group of people might be considered as having access to improved water source due to the simple fact that they are using water from a well. Figure 2 is the picture of the Hyderabad metro, at a place known as Puranapul in the city; tankers provide the water since the public taps had gone dry in early March 2010. Although WHO made it clear that water vendors and tankers are not considered as improved drinking water source, these people might still be counted as with access to improved Figure 2 Source: The Hindu, March 10, 2010. Figure 1 Source: The Hindu, March 10, 2010. 4 Index of Drinking Water Adequacy (IDWA) drinking water because they have public taps, no matter the taps work or not. Similar stories of what may be considered as inadequate access are very common across the developing world (see Figures 3 and 4), and if not addressed properly, will seriously undermine the achievement of MDG within the set time frame. Quest for a Comprehensive Indicator: The WPI The drinking water MDG being spelt out in an extremely simple way, it cannot and is not meant to indicate significant and sustained progress on the drinking water front. MDG for water as it stands now is about access [almost any access]. There is no concern for sustained access; no concern for quantity and quality; there is no linkage between access and resource availability; etc. These and allied considerations have motivated the design and estimation Figure 3: July 28, 2009, in Chifeng City of Inner Mongolia, residents are collecting water from water wagons because the tap water is contaminated by an overflow of rainwater. The tap water was not cut off, but the...