An overview of Water supply and Sanitation:

Water supply and sanitation are fundamental necessities that impact the health, hygiene,
and life expectancy of the people. However, enabling the society with these necessities is
still a challenge in many parts of the world. Recognizing the scale of the problem has led the
UNO to have a separate sustainable development goal for the clean water and sanitation.
Having safe water and sanitation will have a more significant impact than just hygiene;
better hygiene creates more jobs and reduced poverty due to lesser spending on health
issues, thereby creating a sustainable ecosystem. Nearly 33% of the world population (2.5
billion people) do not have have access to adequate sanitation. Improper sanitation can lead
to many diseases like diarrhoea, especially in children, and nearly 1.7 billion children report
diarrhea every year and it is the main reason for malnutrition among children below five
years. Diarrhea is the second highest cause of the death of children below five years and a
significant reason for diarrhea is the lack of proper sanitation.

Providing clean water is also a challenge for the governments as the water
resources in a country will be used for both industrial as well as agricultural purposes. Many
studies suggest that nearly thirty percent of people are facing issues to get safely managed
drinking water. The businesses use nearly twenty percentage of water for their daily
operations and almost seventy percentage for agrarian purposes. Many cities around the
world, including cape town, have announced day zero where the local government has
informed the citizens that it cannot provide water to the city. This situation has spread
worldwide alarming many governments to have a check on their water resources and the
risk assessments. Due to dependence on the water, many companies started to contribute
to preserving water and treating the water from their plants for other uses. Water supply
and sanitation are interlinked with each other, by improving the sanitation systems and
reducing open defacation can help in preserving the water. Therefore the government
should start looking at these challenges as a single problem rather than looking at them as
two different problems and start building balanced sustainable systems.
Role of Government:

The water supply and sanitation are some of the primary responsibilities of the government,
and many countries have a separate ministry to overview the consumption of safe water
and sanitation. After the united nations formed a separate sustainable development goal for
these neccessities, there is an increased focus, especially in developing countries.

Water supply and sanitation in India :

The country is suffering from the twenty one percent of diseases due to unsafe water and
with children being the most affected. The consumption of safe water is from the ground
water and this has led to a reduction in ground water levels in many places like banglore,
hyderabad, and chennai. The decisions related to the water supply are generally at the state
level and highly centralized. The ministry of drinking water and sanitation was created in the
year 2011 to improve the water supply and sanitation in India. The government of India
invested heavily in water supply and sanitation from 2007 with almost an initial investment
of $17.8 billion for five years and still investing heavily in this initiative. Countries like
Germany, Japan have supported this initiative by giving financial grants to India along with
financial institutions like Asian bank and world bank. The government of India takes many
efforts to improve the conditions of water supply and sanitation. Tariffs in India are very low
and the government bares subsidies for water usage for households and industries. Swach
Bharath Abhyan- an initiative started by the government of India began in 2014 to reduce
the open defecation and build safe sanitation for the people with an estimated budget of
twenty seven billion dollars. These initiatives have increased the access to toilets in rural
India from fourty percentage of the population in 2012 to seventy one percentage of the
people in 2018.
Water supply and sanitation in Australia :

With the high chance of drought in many cities, the government of Australia has started
building plants in many cities waste water reuse and de-salination of the ocean water for
clean water. The decision making of water usage has decentralized to the municipalities and
with the commonwealth constitution, the residents were given the power to the water
resources in their local area. However, being the driest continent in the world, the
government of Australia is looking for many alternatives and heavily spending to meet the
demands of the growing population and impact of climate change. The sanitation in
Australia is at satisfactory levels with the chance of disease due to lack of proper hygiene is
very low.