Unreliable Public Water Supply and Coping Mechanisms of Low-Income Households in Delhi

Satarupa Chakravarty, Sukanya Das and Saudamini Das

No 448, IEG Working Papers from Institute of Economic Growth

Abstract: India is reported to have the world’s highest inhabitants without access to safe drinking water.Even in the capital city Delhi, although around 81% of the households have access to piped water supply system, it does not indicate reliability in water supply in terms of quantity or quality. Households adopt various coping mechanisms such as collecting, purchasing, storing, and treating of water to cope with the unreliable and irregular water supply. In this study a household survey was conducted to examine the coping mechanisms and the costs incurred by some low-income households, residing in the command area of the Chandrawal water treatment plant in Delhi. There have been numerous occasions leading to irregularity or disruption in water supply due to planned works, plant operational problems, or high levels of ammonia in the Yamuna River, the source of raw water to this plant. The quantitative and qualitative problems related to unreliable water supply were investigated. The results indicate that, on an average, the annual coping cost to the households is INR 6487 (US$ 93), which is approximately 2.52% of their annual income. Income seems to play a strong role in the choice of coping activities adopted by the households.

Keywords: Coping Cost; Household Production Function; Water Supply; Water Treatment Plant; Delhi (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2021-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published as Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, November 2021, pages 1-33

Downloads: (external link)
https://iegindia.org/upload/publication/Workpap/wp448.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:awe:wpaper:448

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IEG Working Papers from Institute of Economic Growth
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().