More than 80% of people in Karnataka’s rural areas do not have access to drinking water on their residential premises, thus forcing them to depend on inferior and unsafe options, a recent study has revealed.

“In rural Karnataka, only 18.5% of the households reported that the drinking water source was within the household premises,” noted a study conducted by Prof D Rajesekhar and R Manjula at the Centre for Decentralisation and Development of the Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC), Bangalore.

“Increased distance in accessing drinking water forces the people to fall back on inferior and unsafe sources,” said the researchers, who studied data collected from 5,212 of 5,665 gram panchayats (GPs).

The study, Decentralised Governance and Service Delivery—Affordability of Drinking Water Supply by Gram Panchayats in Karnataka, revealed that more than 58% of the GPs were spending more than Rs5 for every Re1 of receipts, raising serious questions of affordability.

“The analysis shows that a large proportion of GPs spent much more than what they received towards drinking water provisioning. In other words, the affordability of GPs to operate and maintain water supply sources was less,” the study noted.

The research found that although poor access to drinking water supply is the result of several factors, the incapability of the GPs to afford or maintain water-supply sources is an important factor too. There was no attempt to find out the affordability of water supply services through periodic calculations and resorting to mid-course corrections, and inefficiency in the expenditure on water supply sources contributed to the problem.

How to improveThe study recommended listing of all houses in the jurisdiction of the GP and bringing them under the house tax (user charges and water cess are part of it) net.

“The state government should enable the GPs to arrive at house tax on equity basis (fixation of tax on the basis of size and quality of the house),” the researchers noted. “The GPs should periodically revise house tax rates. In this regard, incentives are to be provided to them”.

The GPs should apply water-user rates as prescribed by the government and periodically revise them. “The suggestion is that the state should work out incentives in such a way that they motivate GPs to improve tax or user-charges base, collect cess and water-user charges that they themselves fix and periodically revise tax and water user rates”, the study concluded.