Challenge of maintaining WASH service levels: causes and costs

of “Slippage”
Workshop – Hyderabad, March 2009
- background -

Slippage – the issue

Prof. Kirit S. Parikh, member of Planning Commission of the Government of India (GoI), states
in a speech in October 2007 that: “Clean water for all is as important for health as perhaps
health services. Currently, 95% of the villages have clean drinking water. But large number of
villages often slip back and there are numerous villages with serious water quality problems.”
In the budget of 2007-8 the GoI emphasises the priority of tackling the issue of slippage and
non-covered habitations. We define here slippage as the occurrence of WASH service delivery
systems that worked (according to government norms) at a certain moment in time, have
fallen back to a lower level of service delivery. From a government perspective the term
‘slippage’ may refer to ‘fully covered’ habitations slipping into the ‘partially covered’ category,
and ‘partially covered’ habitations slipping to ‘not covered’. A problem with using these
coverage norms, however, is that it assumes a level of reliability of these official figures,
which is often not the case (see for example the study of the Planning Evaluation Organisation
(PEO) by the Planning Commission in 1996-97).

The Working Group on the Tenth Five-Year Plan of the GOI estimated that slippage of drinking
water services affected around 15% of habitations in rural India. Another source that points to
the problem of slippage is a World Bank report1 that indicates evidence that piped water
coverage in several States between the early 1990s and the early 2000s (see figure below)
has actually decreased. The actual problem, however, may still be much bigger.

Although little research has been carried out, it is likely that this so-called ‘slippage’ of the
drinking water services has a number of different causes. Additional to the general quality

1
World Bank, January 2006: India Water Supply and Sanitation – Bridging the gap between infrastructure and
service
(e.g. fluoride and arsenic) and functionality problems (power supply, seasonal) with the water
sources, increasingly the competition for water and the reallocation to other uses becomes an
issue. In other cases, works are of sub-standard quality and poor O&M, due to a range of
causes, including value for money problems, lack of proper support mechanisms, weak village
institutions and poor financing. The technology applied not always matches the changes and
increase in demand over time.
Recent developments will challenge the sustainability of drinking water services, and
especially the issue of slippage due to source problems, even more. The rise in food prices
has put food security again high on the political agenda. One of the strategies that emerge
from the debates is to increase the investments in irrigation infrastructure. These
developments will increase the competition between the different uses of already scarce
water and will put more stress on the sustainability of rural and urban water supplies.

Costs of drinking water services

As little as is known about the actual access to and use of drinking water services, may be
even less is known about the costing of access to sustainable WASH services of good quality.
Construction costs of drinking water systems are in general well known (schedule of rates of
GoI), but the full life cycle costs (includes all repair, capacity building and organisational costs
to keep the service delivery sustainable) are seldom documented. The problem of slippage
points to a relative short life cycle of infrastructure, which increases of course the level of
investments needed per year. An indication for this problem and the problem of lack of
reliable data is the fact that on the one hand GoI claims 95% coverage of drinking water and
on the other hand continues to increase budget allocations for rural water supply. For
example the central allocation of funds for ARWSP (Accelerated Rural Water Supply
Programme) has been stepped up from Rs 2900 crore in 2004–5 to Rs 5200 crore in 2006–7
with a total of 50,000 crores in the period 1972 - 2005.
In addition, the costs of another important factor related to the issue of slippage, poor O&M,
are relatively unknown. The total yearly estimate for O&M of all rural drinking water systems
is 6,000 crores, which is heavy for the central government to bear alone. In fact, there is a mix
of contributions to O&M by State governments, Panchayats and users.

The potential political, social and institutional impact of costs can not become more clear than
by the estimates of the World Bank that capital and recurring cost are 100 to 150 times more
compared to the existing system2 in case existing local source systems are replaced by
systems based on surface water and the water is brought in by pipes. However, in the current
11th 10-year plan it is at the heart of the GoI strategy to move from groundwater-based
systems to systems that use surface water. Main cause is the seasonal and permanent
depletion of groundwater aquifers that has serious social, financial, and institutional
implications including the need to continually replace dried-up sources3. For areas where there
is already a strong competition for surface water this strategy may lead to new conflicts and
dilemma’s.

Slippage in sanitation and hygiene

In the present discourse the term slippage has only been used to refer to the fall back in
service level of drinking water service delivery. However, slippage also occurs in the area of
sanitation, but has a different character. A first distinction to be made is between off-site and
on-site sanitation. The off-site sanitation systems, like traditional sewerage and small-bore
sewerage systems suffer from many similar causes of slippage as the water supply systems.
The issue related to the water source is quite different of course, although many treatment
facilities of sewerage have become defunct because of the wide spread practice that
sewerage is taken out from the transport lines for irrigation use, before the treatment or
untreated disposal.

An important difference between the delivery of drinking water services and on-site sanitation
services is that the latter is in principle a household level system, whereas the first is a
2
World Bank (1999): ‘Rural Water Supply and Sanitation’, World Bank, Washington D.C.
3
3iNetwork, 2007: India Infrastructure Report 2007
community, multi-village or municipal system. In the case of on-site sanitation, important
system components are the use of the services and the social and natural environment. A first
example of slippage in the on-site sanitation system is the fall back in use after the
construction of the latrine and the initial hygiene education campaign, where people
(especially men and children) often prefer their old habit of open-defecation in the fields. The
reason in many cases is that they have constructed the latrine because of social pressure or
status or the simple fact that it was ‘provided’. Another example of slippage points to a form
of fall back in the social and hygienic aspects of the sanitation system as a whole. This occurs
with the so-called double-pit latrine. This latrine is designed to have to pits, where first one pit
is filled with excreta and once full, the second pit is taken in use. The first pit will remain
closed for at least half a year to allow the excreta to turn in compost where after the pit can
be emptied safely. In practice, however the second pit is often not constructed (for saving
initial costs with the argument it will be done once the first pit is filled up) with the
consequence that the pits are emptied manually before the excreta are composted. The latter
is called manual scavenging and continues on a large scale, despite an Indian government
decree to ban this practice completely in 2007. In both examples, the consequence is that the
sanitation service of the beginning has fallen back to an undesired lower level where it can
not be qualified as sustainable and safe.

Crucial for slippage in the area of sanitation is the slippage in hygiene behaviour, which we
define here as ‘falling back to unhygienic behaviour’. One of the most important factors for
this form of slippage is that the change in behaviour is only temporarily, because it was driven
by social pressure rather than by internal motivation.

Like in the case of slippage of water services, the costs of slippage in the sanitation and
hygiene practices are largely unknown. During a recent seminar of practitioners from the field
of sanitation and hygiene4 came to the conclusion that “no good field studies could be found
that assess the effectiveness and the full costs (i.e. to agencies, communities and
households) of the current sanitation and hygiene programmes”.

4
South Asian Sanitation & Hygiene Practitioners’ Workshop Gazipur, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 29-31 January 2008,
organised by BRAC, IRC and WaterAid Asia