Public accountability of urban local government’s water service delivery: a case of the Cumilla city corporation

Abstract

For human development water is fundamental. A city local government such as the City Corporation can play a key role to ensure this fundamental public service of safe water supply to the citizens. The SDG goal-16 focuses on access to water and sanitation for all by the year 2030, and emphasizes achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all. In the world in 2015, 3.78 billion people get at least basic drinking water, while 156.66 million people get this service in Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, 55.67% population gets a safely managed drinking water service, which is defined as one located on-premises, available when needed, and free from contamination (WHO/UNICEF, 2018). Local government institutions have often been a major stakeholder in public water service and management. In this context, this study focuses on the Cumilla City Corporation's (CUCC) water supply services. The general objective of the study is to identify and examine the prevailing status, nature, and problems as regards ensuring public accountability and service delivery in the water supply to the citizens by the City Corporation as a unit of urban local government. As urban governance management, its administration works in a very dynamic environment (political and administrative) and it is a part of the public sector so have to maintain public goods like water supply. If urban governance is a relationship between government and governed than urban management is the relationship between the servers and the served in service delivery. For the collection and analysis of data, a combination of both qualitative and quantitative methods has been used in this research. To understand whether water supply services of the City Corporation are accountable to the citizens, a strategic analysis has been done. To capture the opinion and views of councilors and citizens regarding water supply services, a survey has been performed with a structured questionnaire. Qualitative analysis has also been used to examine the performance of the existing policy and to find gaps with the water services of the CUCC. For this purpose, in-depth interviews were conducted on key informants. The findings of the study, inter alia, reveal that as a new city corporation, the CUCC has very weak institutional capacity regarding water supply. Cumilla is a very old municipality with an archaic water supply infrastructure. With its up gradation to a full-fledged ‘city corporation’, there has been no corresponding capacity enhancement in its water supply facilities. Thus the present water supply infrastructure of the CUCC is not demand-driven, and has not been able to respond to the growing need of the citizens. Citizens remain generally dissatisfied with the quality of water and the associated water supply services that they receive. The CUCC authority and councilors do not maintain any effective monitoring on water service delivery and ensure their services. The councilors were found to be generally reluctant about the water supply issues; they did not feel responsible for water-related matters in any way, and noted that water supply should be the exclusive responsibly (they used the term, ‘headache’) of the CUCC administration. Accordingly, the councilors were not accountable and committed to the citizens for ensuring one of the basic needs. As evident from a critical review of the document, the National Water Policy 1999 stipulates that water resource management requires the involvement of the public and private sectors, communities, and individuals that benefit from the delivery of water-related services. This policy prescription has practically no reflection in the working of the CUCC water management regime. Among others, two major recommendations of the study include: (i) provisioning for a specialized water service agency (such as WASA) within the regular organizational structure of the CUCC; and (ii) developing the culture of regular community-based urban planning for overall development including water supply.