District Drinking Water Planning for Sustainability in Maharashtra: Between Local and Global Scales

Sustainable rural drinking water is a widespread aim in India, and globally, from the household to district, state, and national scales. Sustainability issues in the rural drinking water sector range from increasing water demand to declining groundwater levels, premature deterioration of village schemes and services, inadequate revenues for operations and maintenance, weak capacity of water operators, frequently changing state and national policies, and destabilizing effects of climate change. This paper focuses on the special role of district-scale drinking water planning, which operates at the intersection between bottom-up water demand and top-down water programs. After surveying the challenges associated with bottom-up and top-down planning approaches, we present recent efforts to strengthen district and block drinking water planning in the state of Maharashtra. A combination of district interviews, institutional history, village surveys, GIS visualization, and planning workshops were used to advance district planning goals and methods. Results assess bottom-up processes of water demand; top-down water programs and finance; and intermediate-level planning at the district and block scales. Discussion focuses on potential improvements in district planning methods in Maharashtra.

Social Hydrological Analysis for Poverty Reduction in Community-Managed Water Resources Systems in Cambodia

Achieving sustainable water resources management objectives can work in tandem with poverty reduction efforts. This study evidenced the strong social hydrological linkages that exist in Cambodia, which allowed for presenting a broader understanding of water resources challenges to better formulate and connect policies at the local and national levels. Models are often not developed with household- or community-level input, but rather with national- or coarse-level datasets. The method used in this study consisted of linking qualitative and quantitative social analysis with a previously developed technical water planning model. The results from the social inequalities analysis were examined for three water use types: domestic, rice production, and fishing in three parts of the watershed, namely, upstream, midstream, and downstream. Knowledge generated from the social analysis was used to refine previous water planning modeling. The model results indicate that without household data to consider social inequalities, the technical analysis for the Stung Chinit watershed was largely underrepresenting the shortages in irrigation supply seen by groups in the most downstream sections of the irrigation system. Without adding social considerations into the model, new policies or water infrastructure development suggested by the model could reinforce existing inequalities.