By Bikash Kumar Pati
Considering the decreasing power generation, the state Government is forced to impose the scheduled load shedding, even in state capital to cope with the shortage of power. While routine power-cut is ceasing the luxury of urban life, this is creating hindrance to access to the elixir of life for rural people. Tube wells, once regarded as the only drinking water provider in rural Orissa have lost their importance and ‘Rural Pipe Water Supply’ schemes have picked up like anything, where availability of electricity is the major indicator of drinking water provisioning.

Over the years tube wells fitted with hand pumps have proved to be the most appropriate technique to provide safe drinking water especially for the rural population because of its low cost, speedy execution, easy repair and less recurring cost factors. In recent past, in the name of community participation and demand driven project, somehow the concept of ‘Rural Piped Water Supply’ has been established to show handsome expenditure at the end of the financial years.

To tide over the problem of water crisis, people dig chuans on river beds and wells in agricultural fields, which implies that there is sub surface water that can be harvested even if ground water is too deep to be extracted through bore wells. In hilly terrains, dug wells have been found to be much more effective than bore wells. The department is however obsessed with bore wells – presumably because they are easy to dig. There is a strong case for adopting an area-specific technology rather than resorting to a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach.  The recently much focused pipe water supply that supposedly serves as a better option compared to the tube wells, is in fact soon turning into a burden on users. The overhead tanks are usually left unattended while installing pipe water supply, which in turn leads either to huge water loss through frequent breakages in pipeline for pressure from pump, or to scarcity during non-availability/failure of electricity. Furthermore, the otherwise functional tube wells now turn defunct due to lack of usage.

Even intellectuals verdict is that the ‘Rural Pipe Water Supply’ is the first step towards privatization in drinking water as private players will take-up the system, when community fails to maintain. While executing the projects, certain issues like routine power cut and non availability of overhead tank were not taken into account, which is causing early death to those schemes and leaving villages after villages inside the water scarcity zones.

As pipe water supply projects are useless without electricity and it is the rural people who bear more darkness in case of routine power-cut, it can be easily understood that what will be the implication of routine power cut on rural life. Government has ordered for no power regulation for vital establishments in urban areas, which includes water supply units. But in case of rural, the water supply organizations will only be informed about power cut in advance for timely operation of pump houses. Everybody knows how first the information moves to rural places and what will be the situation. Furthermore, this is all about scheduled load shedding. But what is about unscheduled load shedding, which is a regular one in rural areas?

Availability of water in the desired quantity and quality, at the right time and right place, has been the key to the survival of all living forms. It is high time the department adopted a holistic rather than a fire-fighting approach to address the problem of drinking water. Instead of pipe water supplies as the only seeming solution to the drinking water crisis, the technology needs to be flexible, innovative and location-specific. The tendency of ease of operation in providing for a single, uniform solution to all sorts of problems needs to be sensibly replaced with a more action-oriented effort on the part of the Departments.
[Bikash Kumar Pati, Programme Manager – Water Programme,
Regional Centre for Development Cooperation (RCDC), Bhubaneswar,
bikash@rcdcindia.org ]