People First: How Odisha’s Drink From Tap Mission Quenched Every Thirst

Every year, scores of people all over the world die from waterborne diseases caused by lack of access to clean drinking water. In this background and in a country as large as India, can anyone even think of drinking water directly from a tap? The answer is likely to be a resounding ‘No’. However, one state in India has achieved this seemingly impossible feat—Odisha. The success of Odisha’s public water supply management model has been recognized internationally and many other states and cities are now replicating it.

From the time when the state was infamous for drought and poverty, it is now providing international standard drinking water to lakhs of homes in different parts of the state, intending to do so for every household. G. Mathi Vathanan, a career bureaucrat, has led the Odisha government’s revolutionary Drink from Tap mission. People First provides a robust blueprint and a step-by-step guide to the much-awarded Drink from Tap initiative.

Here's an extract from G. Mathi Vathanan's People First

The seeds of a strong and deep commitment to ensuring a water-secure urban Odisha were sown in me early in my career during my second posting as a young IAS officer in 1997 as a sub-collector. That was when Berhampur, Odisha's third-largest city, was facing a grave water crisis. 

Back then, I was a helpless witness to the suffering that the crisis had caused to the people, thus leading to public unrest, law and order situations and consequent assaults on the officials of the Public Health Engineering Organization (PHEO).1 The state had no choice but to bring water by train wagons from Visakhapatnam in the neighbouring state of Andhra Pradesh, 250 km away, to tide over the city's water crisis during that summer. 

Challenged by the unrelenting crisis and unable to cope with the public pressure, the then executive officer (EO) of Berhampur Municipality fled the city overnight. As an immediate response to overcome the situation, I was given additional charge as the EO of the municipality, and my first job as the EO was to ensure the availability of drinking water for people in all areas of the city. Soon, I realized that besides supplying water to homes, I was responsible for comforting the people suffering from the water crisis for a long time. 

I started by regularly visiting the affected areas, talking to people and reassuring them. The experience gained during that period by dealing with an acute water crisis greatly influenced my thought process in dealing with people-centric problems and instilled a strong resolve in me to ensure piped water supply to every home in urban Odisha. 

When I went to call on the revenue divisional commissioner (RDC) within a few days of joining in Berhampur, I found him surrounded and being heckled by local advocates for not solving the week-long water crisis that the city had been experiencing. The RDC was trying hard to calm the hecklers down. By explaining that his own residence and family had also gone without water for a few days, he hoped to neutralize their rage and gain sympathy. 

Contrary to his hopes, his statements only worsened the situation, as the advocates became more enraged and agitated over what they perceived to be the helplessness of the RDC, who was heading the division with 10 districts under his command, in addressing the water crisis. One advocate could be heard shouting as to how the RDC, who was incapable of getting water for his own residence, could ensure water for others. This incident was another lesson for me regarding what not to say while dealing with such crises. 

The extreme water crisis and resulting hardships suffered by the people of Berhampur triggered my deep resolve to give top priority to water supply later in my career. This incident resurfaced in my mind when I assumed charge as the secretary of the Housing and Urban Development Department (H&UDD) with drinking water management as one of my core responsibilities. Twenty-two years later, in March 2019, I was felt elated when Odisha's first mega urban water supply scheme for Berhampur was inaugurated by the chief minister (CM) to permanently solve the city's perpetual water crisis. 

In my address during the inaugural function, I recalled my personal connect with the water supply crisis faced by the city 22 years ago. I can say that my role, right from the conceptualization stage to the completion and inauguration of the project, was one of the most satisfying aspects of my career. 

After taking charge of the department, I strongly felt that drinking water issues in urban areas should become my top priority. With only 40 per cent of urban areas being covered by piped water supply networks and less than a third of the population in urban areas having house connections (HCs), the water supply situation was grim. The total water supply shortfall was 150 million litres per day (mld) at the state level. 

The average water supply at that time was 60 litres per capita per day (lpcd) against the national benchmark of 135 lpcd2 (about 13 buckets with a bucket capacity of 10 litres, which are normally used in our bathrooms). To me, this appeared to be an incorrect depiction as the estimated supply of 60 lpcd was calculated based on the entire city's population instead of the population in the piped network area. 

This estimate meant that more water was being provided to the 40 per cent of areas covered by the pipe network, whereas the remaining 60 per cent of areas were fed only by hand pump tube wells or polyvinyl chloride (PVC) tanks filled by water tankers. For example, in Bhubaneswar, the quantity of water supplied in 2015 was 350 lpcd against the national benchmark of 135 lpcd (about 35 buckets compared with the national benchmark of 13 buckets of 10 litre bucket capacity). 

The 350 lpcd of water supply was estimated considering the entire population of Bhubaneswar, as the population covered by the pipe network (in 40 per cent areas) received about 600-700 lpcd (about 60-70 buckets per person or 300-350 buckets per family); the remaining 60 per cent of households were left to get by with hand pump tube wells or PVC tanks.In such scenarios, people have no option other than to fend for themselves. The persistent scarcity and irregular availability of water in non-networked areas help the private water businesses to flourish. 

Note: (As per the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), Government of India, 135 litres per capita per day has been suggested as the benchmark for urban water supply.) 

Thus, while some areas in Odisha's 105 cities were being provided with a very high volume of water, the remaining non-networked areas received hardly any water supply. For instance, Bhubaneswar was being supplied with a high volume of 350 lpcd, whereas Belpahar, a faraway small town, was getting only 11 lpcd (one bucket of water per person per day). 

Out of the 105 cities, the ones that were bigger and closer to the state capital were getting higher per capita water supply, whereas water supply in cities that were farthest from the state capital, mostly in western Odisha, was paltry. The inequities that existed within and among the cities were extremely high. 

The urban water supply situation in Odisha in 2015 brought back my memories of Berhampur. When these water supply precarities and system disparities were presented to CM Naveen Patnaik, his face became very grim. He turned towards me and, in a stoic manner, said, 'We must do something,' and left the meeting. This moment lingered in my thoughts from then onwards and propelled me to prioritize and resolve these issues throughout the state as early as possible. 

Note: (PHEO was formed in 1956 by the Government of Odisha under its Housing & Urban Development Department (H&UDD) to provide water supply and sewerage facilities to the urban local bodies (ULBS) of Odisha)

Extracted with permission from G Mathi Vathanan's People First; published by Rupa Publications.