Abstract
Abstract Improving rural drinking water services at the village level is a high priority in India. The National Rural Drinking Water Program (NRDWP) calls for village drinking water plans on an annual basis. However, planning data analysis and mapping are complicated by the different levels of local settlement that are involved. The aims of this paper are: first, to review how the term ‘village’ has come to refer to three different types of settlement for planning purposes in India; second, to show how each settlement type has different water data and Geographic Information System (GIS) map coverage; and third, to identify practical strategies for using these different data and mapping resources to develop rural drinking water plans. We address the first objective through a brief historical review of local government administration and drinking water database development in India. Challenges of data analysis and mapping are demonstrated through a case study of Pune district in Maharashtra. This challenge led to the identification of six practical strategies for coordinating the analysis of drinking water data and GIS mapping for planning purposes.
Highlights
India is devolving from centralized national and state water planning toward local water governance, enabled in part by the 73rd Amendment to the Constitution in 1993, which established the authority of Panchayati Raj levels of local government (Government of India ; Sarma & Chakravarty )
The village has developed three main meanings in India: (1) the Gram Panchayat (GP) unit of local government; (2) the revenue village that is important in Census data collection and mapping; and (3) the habitation which is the smallest settlement for project planning purposes
Using Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping and database analysis, we show how Pune district’s GPs, revenue villages, and habitations are related to one another and how they vary spatially in ways that pose challenges for rural drinking water planners
Summary
India is devolving from centralized national and state water planning toward local water governance, enabled in part by the 73rd Amendment to the Constitution in 1993, which established the authority of Panchayati Raj levels of local government (Government of India ; Sarma & Chakravarty ). Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) have three levels of government: the district (Zilla Parishad); the intermediate level block, taluka, or tehsil (Panchayat Samiti); and the village (Gram Panchayat). The Gram Panchayat (GP), in turn, is further divided into revenue villages and small habitations. Our paper focuses on rural drinking water planning at the district and local village levels of government in India (cf Government of India ; Sangameswaran ; Verma et al ; Hutchings et al ). The village (gaon) has developed three main meanings in India: (1) the GP unit of local government; (2) the revenue village that is important in Census data collection and mapping; and (3) the habitation which is the smallest settlement for project planning purposes. A GP may include multiple villages, each of which may have multiple habitations (Figure 1)
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