How to make Swajaldhara work
Intention and execution are not always related. That's the Swajaldhara lesson. Swajaldhara is a national-level rural water supply scheme that seeks to put in place a people-oriented, decentralised and demand-driven water management regime. To this end, it aims at utilising pachayati raj institutions across the country, empowering them in the process. At present, though, the scheme throws up more questions than answers.
The Swajaldhara scheme has now been extended to 67 districts in 21 states. It proposes that the Union government provides 90 per cent funding for various water supply schemes suggested by panchayats. The remaining 10 per cent will be footed by the panchayats themselves. Essentially, a village-level water supply committee is the cornerstone of Swajaldhara. This committee would be responsible for generating a water supply scheme for its village, and then its implementation. Experiments in the pilot phase of the scheme in some states have shown that the creation of these bodies is crucial to the implementation of Swajaldhara.
In this context, it is necessary to guard against the creation of institutional bodies that run parallel to the gram panchayat. The Swajaldhara scheme does not specify how such a committee would be integrated with the existing panchayati raj framework. The legal status of the committee is also fuzzy. The primary concern should, therefore, be to work out whether the committee will be part of the gram sabha, gram panchayat or another body.
In the course of my travel to villages where a variant of Swajaldhara was being worked out in its pilot phase, I detected an anomaly. The gram sabha had