Costs and service per technology in rural water supply: how efficient are multi village schemes?

In terms of technology choices, the policy is moving towards multi-village schemes as far as rural water supply schemes in Andhra Pradesh, India, are concerned. This paper assesses the cost and service levels across different technologies that are operational in Andhra Pradesh. The main objective is to assess the cost effectiveness in terms of service delivery. Though the study covers eight different technologies or combinations of technologies, the main focus is on individual technologies like hand pumps, mini piped water supply schemes, single village schemes and multi village schemes. At the policy level the technology choice narrows down to single and multi-village schemes as far as public water supply schemes are concerned. This paper is based on cost data generated from187 villages and service level data from 107 villages spread over 9 agro-climatic zones of Andhra Pradesh. While the cost data has been obtained from official documents, the service level data is based on the household data
collected from more than 5,000 sample households spread over 107 villages. The Life Cycle Cost Approach has been adopted in analysing costs while the service ladder approach along with actual water use (quantity) data has been adopted in the case of service level analysis. Cost comparisons are made in terms of cost per capita per year for fixed as well as recurring costs and service level comparisons are made on four indicators viz., quantity, quality, accessibility and reliability. Besides, cost per unit of water is also assessed across the technologies using the actual water use at the household level. [authors abstract]

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