Urban water supply and sanitation in Andhra Pradesh

The Public Health and Municipal Engineering Department (PHED) in Andhra Pradesh (AP) is the nodal agency for planning, design and implementation of water supply and sanitation facilities in the urban local bodies (ULBs). There are different norms for water supply depending on the size of the town and the level of sewage/drainage facilities. The norms are 40 lpcd (litres per capita per day) in case of public stand posts, 70 lpcd in case of towns without underground drainage and 135 lpcd in case of towns with underground sewerage system and 150 lpcd in case of metropolitan cities having population more than one million. The present water supplies in majority of urban local bodies in AP are far below the prescribed norms. Adequacy and equitable distribution are the major problems. The present installed capacity of all the ULBs put together is 1060 MLD (million litres per day) as against the demand of 1358 MLD and the gap is 298 MLD. There are only three ULBs (Vizianagaram, Narsaraopet and
Tirupati) in which water supply is at the rate of 135 lpcd and above. In 73 ULBs the supply is between 70 to 135 lpcd while 45 ULBS are supplying less than 70 lpcd. To the areas which do not have the piped systems and bore wells, about 627 water tankers are supplying water in 96 ULBs. [authors abstract]