Urban News

Be it individuals or corporates, they may have to pay per use. The integrated water management plan developed by the State government looks at water entitlement or licensing system to determine trading as well as pricing of water.

The future plan is to come up with a water measurement unit which will ease pricing and simplify collection mechanism. For this, meters will be installed and water allocation measured.

While water for agriculture and industry will be measured in mega litre (ML), domestic users will have it recorded in kilolitre (KL).

The plan includes installation of meters at off-take points so that supply can be invoiced in terms of KL and ML without reference to who is using it and for what purpose.

This will make pricing easy and transparent too, says an integrated water management report prepared by Water Resources Department and Asian Development Bank.

With new industries coming in and mounting pressure on water supply in the State, there is a need for bringing in reforms which are already in place in other states. The plan calls for protection of access to water by licensing system which can be held by “corporate entities.”

A municipal council could have entitlement on behalf of the residents.  In fact, the strategy is to create a ‘water market’ where the right of access can be bought and sold.

The long-term water resources management plan looks at creation of the Water Regulatory Authority which is expected to be in place by 2012.

In fact, its mandate will be to fix charges for surface and subsurface water used for domestic, agriculture, industrial and other purposes.

The charges aim at recovering the costs of supply - be it at wholesale or retail level.

Base prices will be fixed taking into account the supply entities such as river basins, their capacity and profile of towns and industries.

The authority will put in place a mechanism to review and set cost of water from time to time. Although water prices in the State have never kept pace with the cost in the past, the proposed structure, if it is successful, will be able to cover the costs in seven to eight years, it explains.

“Once supply costs and charges come into balance, the authority might become more concerned with controlling prices so that water users are not stuck with monopoly prices,” it said.

While it will be the responsibility of supplier to collect the charges as prescribed by the water authority, the State Government will have its share of incentive from the reform initiative if agencies, entrusted with the task of collection, manage to collect at least 50 per cent of the charges.

The authority will have the task of recommending distribution methods among various user categories, instruct suppliers on how to govern access to water through regulations and market mechanisms, monitor costs and revenue of agencies engaged in supply and take measures to protect the quality of water against pollution.