Community management in rural water supply: the stake holders’ perspective.

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Seema Nayar, Lalu Mangal

Friday 3 july 2015

15:00 - 15:15h at South America (level 0)

Themes: (T) Hydro-environment, (ST) Rehabilitation of water systems

Parallel session: 16J. Environment - Wetlands

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Kerala is a State with many water starved pockets, especially in the summer months. When the centralized, supply driven rural water supply programmes of the government became inadequate to tackle the drinking water requirements, community managed schemes came up. Since the social characteristics of the community strongly influence projects of this genre, each scheme was found to differ from the other. This paper focuses on the Kerala Rural Water Supply and Environmental Sanitation Project (Jalanidhi), the model of which has become synonymous with rural water supply in Kerala today. Jalanidhi has been lauded as a successful programme, with its unique concept, architecture and performance. However, the project has not been examined from the perspective of the stakeholders. The paper performs this exercise with the help of field data and a theoretical model, linking the two main aspects of the project: the stakeholders’ perspective and service quality. On the basis of the analysis, explicit definition of the roles and responsibilities of the stakeholders are made.