some notes on water and sanitation

So I’ve been here for almost a month and a half, keeping a blog, and some of my closest friends and relatives still don’t know what I’m doing here. I’ll leave that to another post, but for now I will explain what I’ve learned about the water situation here. Suffice it for now to say that the project I’m working for involves using microfinance to provide access to improved Water+Sanitation.

Hyderabad has a great deal of slums, where people have settled but do not own the underlying land. Many of these slums are “notified,” which means that the government admits that they exist and therefore implicitly agree to take care of them and allow them to exist indefinitely. The idea is to move people along the path towards land ownership. Notification is the first step towards that.

And it also means that in those notified slums live some pretty important constituents for the local government. So it’s nice to see that in the past year and a half or so, the water board has bothered to give most of those people some semblance of water coverage. Not good for our project, but I doubt whether the residents here care whether they make good research subjects or candidates for an innovative water supply program.

The government’s implemented some “100 rupee schemes” (forgive me, but when I hear that word I can’t help but think of “my li’l scheme…of Marching UP and DOWN the square”), which means that residents only have to pay Rs. 100 ($2.50) to get a water connection. That beats any loan to pay Rs. 3000…

Anyway, a ton of people have their own connections, even if these only work every two days and for a half hour each of these days. People fill their pots and drums with whatever they can get, and stick it out for a while. But for these guys, waiting at home for the water to come isn’t that big a deal.

When water becomes scarce and people need more, government tankers are always there, driving around the city. I see them all the time – they say “Rs. 500 for 1000L.” It turns out that the tanker operators may be gouging a bit and charging 700 rupees, but you get the idea.

We’ve found pockets of communities without improved water access, but they’re somewhat few and far between. Of course, before we showed up, our data said nothing of the sort. Why? Someone who works for the MFI we’re partnering with here and I feel that I’m supposed to be working for, suggested that there may be some politics behind it. The idea goes like this: the slum-dwellers want special treatment from the government, and one way to get this is to remain officially a slum. So even when services improve, they prefer that the municipal corporation not update the statistics. And the municipal corporation seems to be obliging, thus far.

Either that or the new connections are just too recent. After all, everything takes forever here.