Factors discriminating entitlements to water supply: Empirical evidence from urban household survey in Cuddalore district, Tamil Nadu, India

This paper explores the factors discriminating entitlements to water supply among the different type of urban regions at the household level through the multivariate linear discriminant function model. It presents three empirical evidences from the analysis as follows: (i) Institutional, access, personal and economic factors are principal to discriminating the entitlements to water supply among the urban regions of the study area. (ii) Particularly, institutional and access parameters play a vital role to discriminate slum region from developed and moderately developed regions. On the other hand, personal and economic parameter bifurcate the moderately developed region from the developed region. (iii) Among the different factors, the role of institutional and access factors are more significant to discriminate the entitlements to water-supply as compared to personal and economic factors. Thus, the study suggests that the relaxation in rules for piped water supply connection, introduction of new policies for controlling the market based water supply and managing ground water are indispensable to attain the equality in water access in urban regions.