Urban Water Supply and Sanitation in Andhra Pradesh, 2012.
Dr. M. Rammohan Rao, Dr. M. Venkataswamy, Dr. C. Ramachandraiah, Dr. G. Alivelu
WASHCost (India) Project, CENTRE FOR ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL STUDIES
The Public Health and Municipal Engineering Department (PHED) in Andhra Pradesh (AP) is the nodal agency for planning, design and implementation of water supply and sanitation facilities in the urban local bodies (ULBs). There are different norms for water supply depending on the size of the town and the level of sewage/drainage facilities. The norms are 40 lpcd (litres per capita per day) in case of public stand posts, 70 lpcd in case of towns without underground drainage and 135 lpcd in case of towns with underground sewerage system and 150 lpcd in case of metropolitan cities having population more than one million. The present water supplies in majority of urban local bodies in AP are far below the prescribed norms. Adequacy and equitable distribution are the major problems. The present installed capacity of all the ULBs put together is 1060 MLD (million litres per day) as against the demand of 1358 MLD and the gap is 298 MLD. There are only three ULBs (Vizianagaram, Narsaraopet and Tirupati) in which water supply is at the rate of 135 lpcd and above. In 73 ULBs the supply is between 70 to 135 lpcd while 45 ULBS are supplying less than 70 lpcd. To the areas which do not have the piped systems and bore wells, about 627 water tankers are supplying water in 96 ULBs.
Daily water supplies are provided in 83 ULBs while the supplies are only once in two days in 22 ULBs. In 10 ULBs water supply is done once in three days, in 5 ULBs once in four days, and once in five days in 2 ULBs. The water supply distribution is intermittent in urban areas and the hours of supply vary from one and half hours to 6-8 hours/day in some cities depending upon the availability of raw water and electricity. The majority of ULBs have less than two hours of water supply in a day. Water losses due to leakage, pilferage etc. is estimated to be of the order of 20-50 percent of the total flow in the systems.
The ULBs are supposed to generate adequate revenue to be self sufficient in order to have both physical and financial sustainability of the existing facilities, as well as for current maintenance and future improvement of water supply systems and sanitation facilities. The rates fixed are also not revised periodically, thus, widening the gap between the cost of production and distribution and recoveries from tariff. In many cases, water utilities themselves are not interested in raising water tariff and in other cases approval of the State Government is not easy to come by. Thus, the water supply projects remain commercially unviable and difficult to sustain.
About 31 per cent of urban households did not have access to sanitation (latrine) facilities in the state as per the National Sample Survey (NSS) data in 1998. The Low Cost Sanitation Programme (LCSP) has been going on in AP since 1982-83 in many municipalities in AP with the main objective of conversion of dry latrines as sanitary latrines. In the LCSP phase-III, the progress achieved in terms of construction of the units as a percentage of the sanctioned units is 81 per cent upto the end of April 2009.
However, due to lack, or insufficient quantity, of water availability and low levels of hygiene consciousness many individual toilets in poor households remain unutilized. There are a number of problems which need to be addressed to make the water supply and sanitation sector viable and more citizen-friendly in Andhra Pradesh.
