NOTES january 3, 2009 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 68 Can Decentralisation Improve Rural Water Supply Services? Indranil De A survey of households in six villages in Birbhum district of West Bengal provides evidence that decentralisation in delivery of water supply leads to better quality of services. The participation of the local government in distribution of water supply, and household contribution to operation and maintenance appear to have a positive impact on quality. D ecentralisation in delivery of basic services to rural households has gained prominence in recent times especially after the 73rd Amend- ment of the Constitution. This has made provision for devolving powers and re- sponsibilities upon the local governments, the panchayats or panchayati raj insti- tutions ( PRIs), for implementation of schemes to deliver essential services such as drinking water supply, sanitation, street lighting and roads. 1 Introduction Decentralisation as against centralisation is expected to take care of the needs and preferences of communities as powers and responsibilities are devolved to lower lev- els. It is also expected to increase account- ability of the government in the delivery of services. Therefore, delivery of services is expected to be better through decen- tralised institutions than through centra- lised institutions. Among these services, the provision of drinking water draws im- portance as it has a serious impact on pub- lic health and it is part of the global pro- gramme of poverty alleviation. This article compares the delivery of water sup- ply services through decentralised and centralised institutions and attempts to find out whether decentralisation leads to better delivery of water supply services. The study is based on a household level survey in six villages of Birbhum district of West Bengal. The participation of the local govern- ment in provision of basic services is expected to increase the efficiency of service delivery (Tiebout 1956; Oates 1972, 1977). This is because local governments operate more closely with the people than any other level of government. Therefore, local governments would be able to identify the needs and preferences of communities. If, instead of local governments, line agencies are entrusted with the work of implementing programmes of provision of basic services like water supply and sanitation, it would then end up primarily in engineering solutions (Slaymaker and Newborne 2004; WSP 2004). However, the provision of these services by local governments in develop- ing countries may be hampered by the low capacity of local governments, cor- ruption, elite capture and political influence (Bardhan 2002; Bardhan and Mookherjee 2000; Asthana 2003; Slaymaker and Newborne 2004; Mtisi and Nicol 2003). Experiences of decentralisation in delivery of basic services like rural water supply and sanitation in developing countries reveal that the lack of political account- ability, people’s participation, transparency, policy coherence, capacity at the lower level, and monitoring and evaluation have held back the success of these pro- grammes (WSP 2004). This study illustrates the response of rural households with respect to water supply services. To capture the difference between water supply services of the state and local governments, the study has been conducted in both areas – where the service is provided by the state line department and also the local govern- ment. The line department for water supply in West Bengal is the Public Health Engineering Department ( PHED). It is responsible for installation of sources and also operation and mainte- nance ( O&M). The local governments are primarily responsible for O&M of water supply services. Therefore, only the quality of service has been investigated in the study to examine the impact of decentralisation on water supply. It is ex- pected that the quality of water supply service is better in areas where the responsibility of O&M has been devolved to the local governments. Section 2 of the article describes the survey methodology and data sources. Section 3 provides an account of the vari- ous water supply sources available in the survey villages. In Section 4, the study probes into the quality of water supply in the survey villages. In Section 5, the study looks into the expenditure of survey The author is grateful to his PhD supervisor Ravi S Srivastava for his comments and suggestion on the study. Email: india.indranil@gmail.com