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

4. Among the Indian States

Among the Indian States 83 Among the Indian States Seetharam Kallidaikurichi E. and Bhanoji Rao IDWA was first introduced in the Asian Water and Development Outlook, 2007, a report issued by the Asian Development Bank. The computation of the index (more recently christened IDWA-I) calls for data on 5 different parameters: resources, capacity, access, quality and use. For 28 Indian states, we could manage to obtain data on 4 parameters (resources, access, capacity and quality) and for 15 states on ‘use’ also. All data refer to 2001 or years close to that. Access, however, has two variants: general access that refers to access to water via taps, hand pumps and tube wells, and ‘optimal access’ via taps within residential premises. The two variants provide the basis for computing IDWA-I and IDWA-II. Inter-relationships between the two and between them and a couple of development indicators are also explored and implications noted. It is gratifying to note from the inter-correlations that there is really no second best to a tap in house when it comes to human development. 1. Introduction The National Water Policy 2002 has assigned the highest priority for drinking water supply needs followed by irrigation, hydro-power, navigation and industrial and other uses. The policy envisages the 83 4 84 Index of Drinking Water Adequacy (IDWA) provision for drinking water is made in all water resources projects. The drinking water requirements of most of the mega cities/cities in India are met from reservoirs of irrigation/multi-purpose schemes existing in near by areas and even by long distance transfer. Thus, Delhi gets drinking water from Tehri Dam and Chennai city from Krishna Water through Telugu Ganga Project. Despite various laudable initiatives and programs, it is abundantly clear from the onslaught of diseases such as diarrhoea that water inadequacies continue to plague the people of the country, and one must expect serious differences in water adequacy across the various states. This paper aims to articulate the inter-state differences in household water adequacy by recourse to the index of drinking water adequacy. Rest of the paper is organized as follows. The making of IDWA-I and IDWA-II for the Indian states is explained in the next section. In Section 3, we explore inter-relationships between them as well as between each of them and poverty and human development indicators. Section 4 has concluding observations. 2. IDWA-I and IDWA-II Estimates The Index of Drinking Water Adequacy (since known as IDWA-I) was first conceived and computed for 23 ADB member countries as part of the preparatory work for the maiden issue of the Asian Water and Development Outlook, 2007, brought out by the Asian Development Bank. More recently Seetharam and Rao (2010) have provided IDWA-I and IDWA-II for the same 23 countries. To compile IDWA for Indian states, on a basis similar to the earlier estimates for the Asian economies, data are required on the following parameters: Resources, Access, Capacity, Quality and Use. The data and estimates are explained in detail below. Resources Ideally we should be taking the net annual recharge of both ground water and surface water on a per capita basis as the indicator of Among the Indian States 85 resource. In the earlier investigations, ‘resources’ referred to renewable internal fresh water resources per capita. Such data are available only at the national level and not sub-regional level. Renewable groundwater resources, however, are available at the state level. The data suitably adjusted on a per capita basis could be used as an indicator of state level water resources, provided we have some norm against which to judge the resources in each state. Table 1 helps in arriving at the norm as follows. The average water demand over the two years 2000 and 2010 is 723.5 BCM. Average population is 1.0727. Per capita demand is 674.5 BCM, or equivalent LPCD of 1848. Table 2 has the resource index. Where the index is above 100, we simply peg it at 100 since the idea is to explore adequacy and not over and above adequacy. Access Access is measured as the percent of population with access to a sustainable ‘improved’ water source. As seen in Table 3, improved access comprises water available via tap, hand pump and tube well. The per cent of population with access from any of the three...