Costs and service levels of water and sanitation

The present study's main objectives are to estimate the cost of service provision across peri-urban locations for drinking water and sanitation and the relative expenditure on different cost components in reality against the eisting norms. Life Cycle Cost Approach (LCCA) is adopted to estimate the actual cost components of service provision. The study is based on the analysis carried out using data collected from 18 peri-urban locations spread over nine agro-climatic zones of AP. The data is collected at two levels. At level one cost data were obtained from 18 muncipalities - 2 from each zone. This data is generated from the official records of Public Health and Engineering Department (PHED) at the municipality level. At level two, detailed household level data on socio-economic aspects along with the information pertaining to drinking water and sanitation are gathered from a selected ward from each of the 11 municipalities. Most of the investments are on capital expenditure on hardware i.e on creation of water and sanitation infrastructure assets. Investment on capital expenditure on software is either absent of negligible. Allocations towards water planning and designing are negligible. At the state level, for water, only 30 percent of the households own tap. During summer, households scored above basic services in terms of quality and reliability while 16 percent of the households scored above basic services in terms of accessibility. In case of quantity, we do not find any households which scored above basic service levels.