Drinking and other Domestic Uses

The IWWA/IWA Utility Leaders Forum (ULF) will premier at Aquatech India 2010. The forum provides a platform for CEOs of water utilities to discuss the latest trends and emerging issues on current topics such as linkages between water, energy and climate and their impact on water service delivery across the globe.

This report describes the proceedings of a workshop organised on the 5th of August 2009 at New Delhi, by the Freshwater Action Network South Asia (FANSA), the Forum for Policy Dialogue and Water Conflicts in India (FORUM), India WASH Forum and WaterAid.

The crisis of providing safe and affordable drinking water, as well as meeting the water requirements for livelihoods and infrastructure for rural and urban sanitation in India, is becoming acute by the day. In this context, ensuring the right of citizens to drinking water and sanitation, can be an important policy initiative to help improve the overall situation.

This case study published in Yojana documents Megh Pyne Abhiyan's work in organising access to safe drinking water for rural communities during the 2006 and 2007 floods in North Bihar. As a result of the Abhiyan's work, approximately 13000 and 36000 people accepted and accessed rainwater as a safe drinking water during the North Bihar floods of 2006 and 2007 respectively. Using rain water for drinking led to significant improvement in health indicators and flood-related deaths and sickness, as well as reduction in health expenditure.

This report by ACWADAM based on a rapid hydro-geological appraisal of 2 villages, in Supaul distict in flood-prone North Bihar, gives a good understanding of local conditions as well generates a lot of useful data, that can help in planning groundwater management interventions in a village. Such information is crucial especially for regions such as North Bihar, where current data about the local conditions are literally absent.

The work taken up includes lift irrigation projects, construction of small check dams, rainwater harvesting, promotion of horticulture and timber plantation, promotion of composting and cattle vaccination.

This work won the CII-GBC National Award (Beyond the Fence Category) for Excellence in Water Management in 2008.

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The various initiatives taken up include setting up a monitoring and reporting system to keep track of the water usage, increasing the reverse osmosis plant efficiency, rainwater harvesting, treating sewage and reusing treated water and more.