Water Supply through PPP

• Why in news?
• The Centre has initiated work on a model framework for reforming the management and supply of water in urban areas. The move, which seeks to attract private players in the provisioning of water, would be a significant reform. 
• Status:
• According to a 2014 World Bank report, water is available for just 4 hours on an average in urban centres, with many cities actually getting supply every alternate day.  
• utilities are ridden with inefficiencies and leakages. 
• 20 per cent of connections are metered, 
• while no revenue is collected on over 40 per cent of water supplied in most cities.
• Benefits:
• bring down non-metered connections and revenue leakages
• Solutions: (can be used in any question)
• government must first make a correct assessment of the investment required in any PPP water supply project. 
• In the past, inadequacy of such data has upset the calculations of private players and reduced their incentive to participate. 
• Second, agreements between stakeholders should be designed to ensure clear accountability for non-performance. 
• Ideally, there should be more than one service provider in any given area, which can be done by enforcing infrastructure-sharing or even spinning off backbone pipelines into separate entities. 
• Last, the reforms need to be backed with effective articulation of the benefits, especially to consumers and civil society groups, without whose support the project may lose out.