Abstract:
Poor water supply & sanitation services continue to be critical problems in rural
areas despite considerable effort to improve and expand coverage. Mounting
evidence indicates that centrally managed schemes, are difficult to implement
and operate when the communities served are dispersed, remote and relatively
small. Application of sophisticated technology in such systems leads to high
cost in implementation and management that are unaffordable to manage. High
O&M and management costs need to be covered by charging high tariffs.
Beside above there is a ·lack of financial resources and physical and social
infrastructure needed to support development or to maintain new systems. In
contrast, locally managed systems appear to function reasonably well at
affordable prices and looks to be sustainable. Although such schemes are
obviously difficult to standardize for all communities due to the unique nature
of each case, water & sanitation experts agree that they have numerous
advantages over other approaches and that the question is no longer whether
community management should be promoted, but how it should be done.
In the study, attention was focused towards the sustainability of the provided
water supply and sanitation facilities. To sustain the facilities over a long
period of time capacities of managing agencies should have acceptable
standards. The main component of the study was assessing the capacities of the
Community Based Organizations that are vested with power and authority in
the management of rural water supply schemes covering the small town
category. Study was carried out by observing the situations of six locations
where small town water supply schemes have been constructed. Some of these
schemes are managed by the local authorities and some by the implementing
agencies like NWSDB. NWSDB and local Authorities are powerful legal
entities with an established institutional strength recognized by the legislature
and the society. However the conditions of CBOs are not that fascinating.
Therefore capacity assessment was made focusing the CBOs to a greater extent
and the achievements of CBOs were compared against the outputs and
performance ofNWSDB & LA set up as well.
The six small town schemes studied are diverse in the form of technology
adapted, and the nature of management. Therefore, thought had to be extended
to various aspects representing these special features while carrying out the
assessment. Since all the schemes are planned, implemented and managed with
effective involvement of the users in the demand driven environment under the
participatory background, the research study was also executed in participatory
basis.
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Study was carried out by conducting interviews with user communities,
obtaining data by distributing a questionnaire, making observations by
participating in community meetings and monitoring and evaluating the
performance of CBOs by interacting with the communities in progress
meetings, during the implementation stage of the project.
Data gathered from the collected information were analysed to study the
aspects given in the objective of the research. Findings of the study were
presented comparing the .outputs of different maintaining agencies of water
supply schemes such as CBOs, LAs and NWSDB. Inputs from district
sociologists were obtained when social aspects of water were addressed.
This thesis describes the out come of a study carried out to assess the
Capacities of Community Based Organizations (CBOs) in various aspects of
user centred water supply schemes, taking six small town schemes as case
studies as described above.