India has moved up a notch on the UNDP’s Human Development Index — it is 126 out of 177 countries, compared to 127 a year ago. The HDI is a composite index based on income, health and education indicators.

At its present pace, India is going to miss the Millennium Development Goal on sanitation which is halving the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and sanitation.

The report called ‘Beyond Scarcity: power, poverty and the global water crisis’ is linked to the previous year’s report which had shown that despite its economic growth, India’s child mortality continued to remain high. Water and sanitation is key to saving lives of these children, the new report states.

Not surprisingly, Bangladesh has upped India on this front too. “India may outperform Bangladesh as a high growth globalisation success story, but tables are turned when the benchmark for success shifts to sanitation: despite an average income some 60% higher, India has a lower rate of sanitation coverage,’’ says the report while pointing out that 10 years ago, the two countries faced similar problems. Since then, India has enjoyed far more rapid growth, widening the income gap between the two countries. But in rural sanitation, it has fallen behind.

Experts suggest that the question on water is not its availability but access .”Today some 1.1 billion people in developing countries have inadequate access to water and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation. These deficits are rooted in institutions and political choices and not in availability,’’ said Arunabha Ghosh, one of the author’s of this year’s report while speaking at its release in New Delhi.

The report reiterates that it is the poor people who suffer the most: In Delhi, Karachi and Kathmandu, fewer than 10% of households with piped water receive the service 24 hours a day. The poor are less likely to be connected, facing deprivation.

In Gujarat, there are waterlords who buy and dig deep wells and sell water at high rates to the poor people. In parts of India, groundwater tables are falling by more than 1 metre a year, jeopardizing future agriculture production. The report states that climate change is going to make the situation more acute.

However, India demonstrates both problems and solutions. It is possible to reverse the situation with additional investment and proper regulatory policies. In Kerala, research following implementation of seven rural water projects found that incidence of water-bourne diseases fell by half in five years after construction of deep wells.

The report is peppered with numerous case studies from across the country that show how community mobilization with good governance can make a difference. The National Slum Dwellers Federation in Mumbai galvanized people to construct low-cost toilets. The successful Total Sanitation Campaign in Bangladesh, later adopted by West Bengal, has achieved extraordinary progress (see accompanying story).

In Hyderabad, the water utility has increased coverage and improved performance in revenue collection, repairs and service provisions. Research in Maharashtra has shown that contracting out billing, repairs, water treatment and infrastructure updates can improve performance. The report points to the importance of effective regulation to manage water resources better. Though Bangalore applies a rising block tariff — subsidies benefit non-poor more than poor — the wealthiest of 20% of households receive 30% of water subsidy and the poorest 20% receive10.5%.

Involvement of citizens can make that vital difference: Citizens’ report card in Bangalore gave resident associations and community groups a voice in reforming their water utility and improving accountability.

The UN report calls for eradication of perverse subsidies on water that lead to its wastage. It says that if water were to be sensitively priced and regulated, it was unlikely that a water intensive crop like sugarcane would be grown on its current scale across Gujarat. “Because electricity subsidies tend to rise with the size of holding and depth of wells, they are highly regressive, wealthier the producer, the bigger the support,” it said. It says extending check dams across all of India’s rainfed farming areas would raise the value of the monsoon crop from $36 billion a year to $180 billion for an initial investment of $7 billion. It clarifies that rainwater harvesting does not make large dams obsolete.

“Given the very high poverty rate in rainfed areas, it was difficult to envisage another investment with more potential to enhance human development and extend benefits of India’s economic success into rural areas,” it said.