Active Stocks
Thu Mar 28 2024 15:59:33
  1. Tata Steel share price
  2. 155.90 2.00%
  1. ICICI Bank share price
  2. 1,095.75 1.08%
  1. HDFC Bank share price
  2. 1,448.20 0.52%
  1. ITC share price
  2. 428.55 0.13%
  1. Power Grid Corporation Of India share price
  2. 277.05 2.21%
Business News/ Opinion / Blogs/  Water, water everywhere, not a drop to drink
BackBack

Water, water everywhere, not a drop to drink

Improved access to safe water can improve health and empower women

Nearly three-quarters of rural Indian households do not have access to safe drinking water on their premises according to the Census 2011 data. Photo: HT Premium
Nearly three-quarters of rural Indian households do not have access to safe drinking water on their premises according to the Census 2011 data. Photo: HT

Every monsoon brings with it stories of child deaths in different parts of the country owing to the rampant spread of water-borne diseases. Nearly three-quarters of rural Indian households do not have access to safe drinking water on their premises according to the Census 2011 data, and the absence of safe water leads to the deaths of about 2,00,000 children under four years annually, according to a 2013 Lancet study.

That piped water leads to better child health outcomes is well known but new evidence shows that access to piped water also leads to an improvement in gender outcomes—better educational attainment as well as greater employment opportunities for females. Women, young and old, have to suffer the daily drudgery of drawing water from sources which are located more often than not kilometres away from their premises. Therefore, the beneficiaries from having access to water within the premises are women; lesser time spent on fetching water means more labour-force participation, and greater levels of education for them.

A recent working paper by Sheetal Sekhri of the University of Virginia draws attention to the positive impact of having access to water nearby on literacy rates of women. Using data for 8,261 villages in the state of Uttar Pradesh, she finds that female literacy rates are 5% greater in villages with better water access accounting for many demographic and geographical characteristics. The paper adds further the “suggestive evidence that time spent on fetching water has a negative effect on schooling outcomes of children including enrolment, attendance, dropping-out, and hours spent doing homework. I also show that children who spend longer on fetching water perform poorly on tests of basic skills in Math, reading and writing".

One way in which the gender-bias could be reduced is greater political voice for women. In 1992, through the 73rd Amendment in the Constitution, one-third of seats in all Panchayat positions were mandated to be reserved for women. In a widely cited study on the impact of political reservations on public goods outcomes, Esther Duflo of the MIT and Raghabendra Chattopadhyaya of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta find that a village with a female head invests far more on setting-up or repairing water facilities than a village which has a male head.

Greater coverage of tap water is also associated with lower incidence of disease among children. Jyotna Jalan of the Center for Social Science Studies, Kolkata and Martin Ravillion of the World Bank found significantly lower levels of diarrhoea among children in households that had access to piped water.

India has struggled to improve nutritional outcomes chiefly because of poor sanitation and lack of clean drinking water. The recently released district level health survey results suggest that the number of underweight children have remained more or less the same between 2005-06 and 2013-14. The absence of toilets and safe drinking water leads to rampant spread of childhood diseases, which inhibit children’s ability to absorb food.

The absence of any major thrust on provisioning of water may partly reflect the stratification of our society, which makes it difficult for diverse social groups to agree on desirable public goods. Collective action problems are more acute, and subsequent delivery of public goods lower, in rural areas of districts that are more heterogeneous in terms of caste, according to a recent paper by Divya Balasubramanian of the St. Joseph’s University, and Santanu Chatterjee and David Mustard of the Georgia State University.

However, the effect of social divisions on water access could well be offset by an increase in political voice of the marginalized caste groups. While the scheduled castes (SCs) have found a reasonable level of political voice in India, scheduled tribes (STs) exhibit limited political participation. The divergent trends in outcomes between SCs and STs could partly reflect their differing levels of political voice. The Census 2011 data shows that 16% of SC households in India have access to clean piped water, whereas only 8% of ST households get potable water on their premises.

Fixing the tap water woes of India will require imaginative public interventions with a focus on delivering clean drinking water to every household. The benefits of such interventions will be manifold. Greater hygiene, clean drinking water and sanitation have been the main drivers of improved health across nations, history shows.​

Sumit Mishra is a research scholar at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai

Economics Express runs every week, and features interesting reads from the world of economics and finance

Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!

Catch all the Business News, Market News, Breaking News Events and Latest News Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates.
More Less
Published: 01 Aug 2014, 11:02 AM IST
Next Story footLogo
Recommended For You
Switch to the Mint app for fast and personalized news - Get App