(12th World Lake Conference Taal 2007, p. 112)
The world’s freshwater resources are under increasing pressure. Growth in population, increased economic activity and improved standards of living lead to increased competition for and conflicts over the limited freshwater resource.
Integrated Water Resource Management is a systematic process for the sustainable development, allocation and monitoring of water resource use in the context of social, economic and environmental objectives. Although it is generally accepted that privatization is an effective measure that overcomes inefficiencies inherent in Public only Water Management system and has considerable economic benefits, but now developing countries like India are faced with difficult decisions like:
Continue provision through a public enterprise, although capital shortages are prompting the consideration of other alternatives
Encourage autonomous, self-governing voluntary cooperatives, although this has worked better for small systems in rural areas
Accept that paying monopoly prices fora high quality service may be better than continuing with an inferior service
Transfer services to private management and use regulatory policy and instruments as a means to influence private sector behaviour
Thus, the importance of public institutions capable of maintaining an adequate regulatory framework in place cannot be overemphasized. “There is clear evidence that, under regulation, some kind of private sector involvement is beneficial to users”. But where regulation is limited or unenforceable, it may genuinely be that transfer to the private sector is either not viable or undesirable. Thus we seek a balanced approach in which both private as well as public players come into play. The extent of involvement of each player will be analyzed based on different PPP models. In this paperwe analyze the appropriateness of different PPP models (namely Public Leveraging, Contracting and tendering, Franchise, Joint Venture, Strategic Partnership) or a combination of these models.
