Metering and Pricing

1. Meaning of Ground Water

• Water located beneath the ground surface.

 Groundwater is stored in and moves slowly through layers of soil, sand and rocks called aquifers. Aquifers typically consist of gravel, sand, sandstone, or fractured rock, like limestone.

With tihs, they can improve water and sanitation service regulation and provision at international, national and local levels. Directed primarily at community groups, human rights NGOs, rights-based development practitioners and aid workers, this handbook aims to strengthen human rights-based advocacy by providing innovative and practical suggestions that activists and organisations can use in their work. It also acts as a resource guide for finding further information.

Water and sanitation are essential for living a healthy life with dignity. However, around a billion people across the world lack access to a safe and sufficient water supply to cover their basic needs. Over 2.5 billion people lack access to adequate sanitation and nearly 1.2 billion face the indignity of open defecation every day.

The Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target to halve the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015 is seriously off track, with sanitation severely lagging behind. For example, estimates suggest that at current rates of progress, sub-Saharan Africa will miss the MDG water target by about 25 years, while the sanitation target may not be reached until well into the 22nd century.

It underlines, in this regard, the importance of a responsible municipal fiscal and financial system, simplification of existing water pricing and tariff structures, and regulatory mechanisms which are able to balance the interests of the producers and consumers of urban services.

All of us have felt the joy of slaking one's thirst with water, washing away the unforgiving heat of a Delhi summer with a cool glass of water. But have you ever paused to think about where we get our water from? How are we using this resource? Is it finite or will be always get clean water, everyday, for all our needs?

Content Courtesy: Solution Exchange and Nitya Jacob
Author: Nitya Jacob

India’s arteries are choking. Her rivers, the lifeline of hundreds of millions, are over-taxed, polluted and encroached. They are being mined, dammed and emptied of water. Save for the four monsoon months, most rivers are streams of drains, depending on how many cities they pass through. This year people gaped in awe at the River Yamuna (I am sure they were over-awed by other rivers elsewhere too) as for the first time since 1978 looked like a river and not a drain.

This paper is an outcome of  The Energy Research Institute's (TERI’s) study for the Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) under the Ministry’s Centre of Excellence (COE) to “Review the existing guidelines of determination of user charges for water and sanitation services and to incorporate economic principles of pricing in urban water supply sector in India”.

In this article published in Commodity Vision, the author presents the concept of the establishment of a 'futures market in water availability' in the context of the risk of water availability that Indian agriculture has been facing in the recent years.

With South Asian agriculture being dependent on the timely occurrence of the monsoons, any deviation from the scheduled arrival of the monsoon causes problems not only for the farmers, but also produces a threat to the food security of the region. However, the author argues that, there is no market in South Asia where users and investors exposed to water availability risk can effectively hedge against such a risk.

This working paper by the University of Bonn attempts to give a spatial and temporal overview of water management in India. It traces how people and the successive regimes made choices across space and time from a wide range of water control and distribution technologies. The paper divides the water management in India into four periods –

• the traditional system of water management before colonial times;
• response from the colonial rulers to manage the complex socio-ecological system;
• large scale surface water development after independence; and
• finally, the small-scale community and market-led revolution.

This document provides the details of the revisions suggested in the water tariff for domestic, industrial, commercial and institutional consumers and of sewerage maintainance charges in urban areas.