Abstract
Sustainability of water supply services has been central to the main water supply agenda globally. In order to promote affordable, equitable, and sustainable water supply, this paper proposed a method to set the piped water price inside Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. The Melamchi Water Supply Project (MWSP) is currently under construction inside the valley to tide over the water deficit. Domestic water use and expenditure data were obtained from a household survey of 1500 households. Post-MWSP were developed based upon per capita water use and water price. Equity and affordability were evaluated by comparing the ratio of water expenditure to total expenditure of households (expenditure ratio: ER) in each service area. The expenditure for piped water service and alternate water sources was taken into account to calculate the total water expenditure. Sustainability was measured as the ratio of operation and maintenance cost to the total revenue of the utility (Working ratio: WR). The results show that an increase in water price by approximately 54% over the current price is necessary to meet operation and maintenance costs, assuming the WR to be 0.7. Approximately 30% increase in water use (a minimum of 80 LPCD) can be maintained post MWSP. However, water use of 135 LPCD increased the ER by more than 1%, which was the threshold of water affordability and may cause ground water stress.
Highlights
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim to achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all by 2030
The results of this study show proper the water distribution mechanism and the water price are going to play critical roles in improving the indicators such as ER and working ratio (WR) that are critical for water affordability, equity, and utilities sustainability
The water price should be adjusted in such a way that it promotes 80 liter per capita per day (LPCD) and more research on inclining blocks tariff (IBT), and ground water accessibility would be needed inside
Summary
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim to achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all by 2030. SDGs include sustainability of water in four major components universality (accessible to all), equitability (proportionately accessible in rightful manner), safety (within the water quality standards), and affordability [1]. Was the primary way to measure the affordability. The equitable access and distribution are difficult to be measured solely by “willingness to pay” [2,3,4,5]. The affordability of water supply services to households is subject to household income, whereas the water utility’s economic sustainability is linked to revenue generated from water price. Regulating bodies from the government formulate price
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