India’s Water Crisis: Maharashtra’s Municipal Corporations Struggle With Rising Water Losses

At the bustling offices in a rusty building of an urban local body about 500 kilometres from Mumbai, lawmakers fret over their balance sheet almost every day.

The municipal corporation of Latur, a tier-3 town in the western state of Maharashtra, has a minimum annual expenditure of Rs 75 crore. “But our receipts never exceed Rs 35-40 crore,” said Ashok Govindpurkar, corporator with the Congress party in Latur since the 1985.

Shailesh Swami, corporator with the Bharatiya Janata Party that currently administers the Latur municipal corporation, explains that there are around 1 lakh properties in the town, but only 55,000 registered water connections.

“Illegal water connections cause significant loss to the corporation,” he said. “On top of that, many of those who have authentic connections do not pay the regular water tax of Rs 1,800 per year. If you multiply 55,000 with 1,800, you should get around Rs 10 crore. People do not have the mentality to pay for services.”

The municipal corporation of Latur is responsible for providing water to its near-4 lakh population spread across 32 square kilometres. The town, however, also attracts students from across the state and houses one of Maharashtra’s agriculture markets. Including the floating population, the number of people consuming water easily touches nearly 5 lakh, Swami said.

According to Swami, the water requirement of the town is estimated at around 70-75 million litres per day. What the corporation is able to lift from available water resources is only about half of that. We have to consider the availability of water, as well as availability of money while providing water to the town, Swami said.

While the authorities blame people for not paying water taxes, residents with illegal connections and piling water bills argued that they rarely get adequate water.

“We would have had no problems in paying water tax if we had received some water in the first place,” said a woman, requesting anonymity. “If you provide water once in 10 days, you cannot call it service. Rs 1,800 is a tax for 365 days. At thrice a month, you are providing water only 36 days.”

Latur—falling in the drought-prone zone—has been facing acute water scarcity for more than a decade. According to India Meteorological Department, the rainfall data shows a 37 percent shortfall in monsoon for Latur in 2019 as well. Corporators said the available water stock would only last until mid-August. Currently, the municipal corporation is able to supply water to its residents only once in 10 days, for its reservoirs are drying up.

Funding Water Supplies

A number of urban local bodies across the state of Maharashtra are in the same boat.

There are 264 of them—26 municipal corporations, 231 municipal councils and 7 cantonment boards. The Fourth Finance Commission report on Maharashtra released in 2015 said the “total deficit for municipal corporations and municipal councils in Maharashtra comes to Rs 13,673.71 crore”. It observed: “During the period FY 2008 to 2014(BE), the (state) assistance to urban local bodies has grown by almost 1.8 times.”

The next report is set to release in 2020, and observers believe the losses would have only increased. “Latur’s municipal corporation currently has a debt of Rs 350 crore that has piled up over the years,” said Govindpurkar. “Rs 70 crore of those are water bills.”

But the urban local bodies have no way of reducing expenditure on water, as more and more of them are drawing water from faraway reservoirs to meet the increasing demand. The distance only exacerbates the cost of drawing water due to the electricity bills involved.

Until the early 1980s, Latur’s major source of water was a tiny barrage on the Manjra river about 7-8 kilometers from the town. Around the mid-80s, the town moved to drawing water from a relatively bigger barrage on Nagzari river. It was still 12 kilometers away. In the 90s, Swami said, the town had to tap into the dam at Dhanegaon—80 kilometers from the town—because of expansion of the city along with population growth.

“We initially sought water through the Nagzari river,” he said. “The gates of the dam would be opened depending on the requirement, but farmers along the way would guzzle the water meant for Latur town. So we asked for a closed pipe that connected Dhanegaon to Latur, which became operational in 2005.”

That pipe brings water from Dhanegaon to Harangul—on the outskirts of Latur—where the water is purified at the treatment plant. From Harangul, the purified water is loaded into 11 storage tanks in the town, from where the water is distributed through a 500-kilometre underground pipeline across the city. Some of the pipes are in use from the time of Nizam.

The entire operation requires power consumption, with gravity playing a partial role.

According to the municipal corporation’s documents, which BloombergQuint has reviewed, electricity used to lift water has risen from 3,31,155 units in March 2015 to 3,77,415 in March 2019. Records prior to 2015 were not available.

Higher Costs; Limited Pass-Through

While the expenses behind water have only increased, the water tax of Rs 1,800 has remained constant for the past six years.

To be able to achieve adequate water pricing, said a corporator on condition of anonymity, one must first be able to calculate water usage properly.

“We know the amount of water we pump from Dhanegaon, but we do not know how much of it reaches the treatment plant at Harangul,” he said. “While the water is being purified at Harangul, we do not know how much of it is wasted during the process. From the treatment plant to the different storage tanks of Latur, and from the tanks to different colonies, there are leakages at every step, but we do not know how much.”

As such, there is no clear mechanism to even calculate the expenses associated with the supply of every 1,000 litres of water. “We ideally need to install water meters to keep tabs on that. But that would mean more expenses, and we cannot afford that at the moment. There is no way we can improve efficiency at this rate,” he added.

Devendra Singh, municipal commissioner of Latur, did not respond to phone calls and messages.

The inefficiency and callousness towards water is not only limited to the municipal corporation of Latur. It reflects among its residents too.

The underground pipeline connecting the entire town has outlets from where residents fill up water, whenever the corporation releases it. Those open-ended outlets pop up in front of every household that has secured a water connection. However, hardly anybody has attached a tap at the end of them, meaning the water overflows until the corporation pulls the plug, resulting in incessant wastage of water. Residents that BloombergQuint spoke to asked why they should waste money on a tap that would be used only once in ten days.

KA Bamankar, executive engineer with the water department of the municipal corporation, said, “Water conservation should also be people’s responsibility. It does not need much time and effort to attach a tap at the end of your water connection so you can turn it off when you are done filling up water. The corporation cannot provide everything.”

The Cost Of Water

In trying to reduce losses from the supply of water, the dilemma faced by authorities is who should pay for water and how much. At present, the rules and regulations around the pricing of water are complex and often ineffective.

Water is a state subject. Each state, therefore, has its own water regulatory authority and follows its own policies.

The Maharashtra Water Resources Regulatory Authority calculates the total money spent on water and apportions cost across three separate categories—agriculture use (19 percent), domestic use (22 percent) and industrial use (59 percent).

That division is based on four criteria—affordability, accessibility, timeliness and quality, said an official with the regulatory authority who spoke on condition of anonymity. Quality, he explained, was judged by how much pollution the user generates after consuming water.

But it doesn’t end there.

• Differential rates exist for Gram Panchayats, Urban Local Bodies and Municipal Corporations.
• The rates for agricultural water supply are further divided based on whether the supply is during the Kharif, Rabi or “hot weather” seasons. Registered water associations get the water at a lower rate compared to individuals.
• Rates for domestic water supply and industrial water supply are divided based on “assured water supply from reservoir”, “regulated water supply with conveyance loss from rivers, canals or dams” and “partly assured water supply from the stream without any release of water from upstream canal or river”.

We gave weightage to every criteria, made a composite matrix and then derived the division of cost, along with consulting different stakeholders, the MWRRA official quoted earlier said.

Charges are to be reviewed every three years. The most recent review in 2018 came seven years after the previous 2011 review.

Beyond existing pricing policies, the bigger debate is whether water should be seen as a social commodity or an economic commodity. Those who see it as the latter believe that water should be priced, to a large extent, on commercial terms. Others feel it should be a free of cost public good. A middle path would be to price appropriately when it is used for commercial purposes, and provide it free when it is used to fulfill basic human needs.

For now, authorities are torn. Amol Govande, a writer based in Latur, said the urban local bodies are confused whether they are professional service providers or NGOs. “The longer they take to figure it out, the messier their governance would get,” he said.

This is the third part of a BloombergQuint series on India’s Water Crisis.