Sustainable urban water supply in south India: Desalination, efficiency improvement, or rainwater harvesting?

Abstract

[1] Indian megacities face severe water supply problems owing to factors ranging from growing population to high municipal pipe leakage rates; no Indian city provides 24/7 water supply. Current approaches to addressing the problem have been "utility centric," overlooking the significance of decentralized activities by consumers, groundwater extraction via private wells, and aquifer recharge by rainwater harvesting. We propose a framework that makes it possible to evaluate a wider range of centralized and decentralized policies than previously considered. The framework was used to simulate water supply and demand in a simulation model of Chennai, India. Three very different policies, supply augmentation, efficiency improvement, and rainwater harvesting, were evaluated using the model. The model results showed that none of the three policies perfectly satisfied our criteria of efficiency, reliability, equity, financial viability, and revenue generation. Instead, a combination of rainwater harvesting and efficiency improvement best meets these criteria.

Modeling Residential Water Consumption in Amman: The Role of Intermittency, Storage, and Pricing for Piped and Tanker Water

“…An approach that is compatible with the modeling objective pursued here is the "tiered supply curve" approach developed by Srinivasan et al [20,21] for a similar case study in Chennai, India. This case study also features important aspects of the situation in Jordan, such as intermittent supply, private (informal) tanker water markets, and the reliance of households on several water sources that differ in quality.…”

“…This should also be consistent with the demand function of Salman et al [14], since bottled water consumption also seems to have been excluded in its calculation. The "tiered supply curve" model has the advantage that the consumption quantities from all sources considered and the consumer surplus generated by this consumption can be calculated based on a single demand function [20]. Therefore, it allows for the consistent determination of consumer surplus across supply sources, which we are aiming to conduct.…”

Modeling integrated urban water systems in developing countries: case study of Port Vila, Vanuatu

“…Rainwater storage and capture in the wet tropics, and indeed, in all contexts, present an opportunity to increase the efficacy of rainwater utilization for either domestic use or urban agriculture (Thomas 1998;Mwenge Kahinda and Taigbenu 2011;Islam et al 2010;Srinivasan et al 2010). …”

“…The literature promotes the use of alternative water supply sources in developing countries (Makropoulos and Butler 2010;Srinivasan et al 2010). Alternatives to large scale, traditional end-of-pipe approaches to wastewater and stormwater management are also advocated (Butler and Parkinson 1997;Larsen et al 2001;Otterpohl et al 2003;Larsen et al 2009).…”

Ecosystem service enhancement for the alleviation of wildlife-human conflicts in the Aravalli Hills, Rajasthan, India

“…This is largely related to abandonment of centuries-old localised, community-based capture of monsoon rains in favour of mechanised exploitation of available resources. Abandonment of traditional water resource recharge practices is being substantially driven by a policy environment strongly favouring individual energised pumping of receding groundwater (reviewed by Everard, 2015), as well as the damming and diversion of water to serve major population centres depriving rural catchments of natural flows (Srinivasan et al, 2009). There is a distinct lack of balancing measures to maintain or promote groundwater recharge.…”