Water and Sanitation: Institutional Challenges in India

The water and sanitation picture for the rural and urban poor in India is dismal and a lot needs to be done to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of people without these essentials. Traditionally, the public sector in India was assigned a dominant role in planning, development and management of drinking water supply and sanitation projects. Now a more decentralized demand-driven approach based on public-private partnership is coming up. This book deals with the real situation in drinking water supply and sanitation in India. In Part II research is presented on experiences in the implementation of the sector reforms for drinking water and sanitation in rural and low-income urban areas. Part III of the book is devoted to scaling up the implementation of decentralized management of small-scale water supplies by local government, user organizations and local enterprises in the light of the above-mentioned issues. In Part IV, the circle is closed by going back to the international context with attention to privatization of urban water supply and sanitation by national and multinational companies. The relevance of action research in the domestic water supply sector in India is high. It is hoped that this book, with its richness of information on experiences of different actors, will stimulate further research in this field.