Coping with unreliable public water supplies: Averting expenditures by households in Kathmandu, Nepal

Abstract

[1] This paper investigates two complementary pieces of data on households' demand for improved water services, coping costs and willingness to pay (WTP), from a survey of 1500 randomly sampled households in Kathmandu, Nepal. We evaluate how coping costs and WTP vary across types of water users and income. We find that households in Kathmandu Valley engage in five main types of coping behaviors: collecting, pumping, treating, storing, and purchasing. These activities impose coping costs on an average household of as much as 3 U.S. dollars per month or about 1% of current incomes, representing hidden but real costs of poor infrastructure service. We find that these coping costs are almost twice as much as the current monthly bills paid to the water utility but are significantly lower than estimates of WTP for improved services. We find that coping costs are statistically correlated with WTP and several household characteristics.

Dynamics of Domestic Water Consumption in the Urban Area of the Kathmandu Valley: Situation Analysis Pre and Post 2015 Gorkha Earthquake

“…Our study was similar to other reports [9,17], which showed that the duration of the piped water supply pre-GEQ was very short (four hours weekly), and which further shrank to 2.3 h post-GEQ. Piped water consumption varied depending upon the altitude of the location and the KUKL branches.…”

“…This could be attributed to the drastic reduction in piped water consumption post-GEQ because use of alternative water sources is a coping strategy [15,17] to supplement the inadequate piped water amount. Similar to the impact on piped water consumption, the occurrence of the GEQ affected groundwater and jar water consumption reduction.…”

“…Furthermore, the wealth status of the residents could be a vital factor in determining water consumption. In the valley, the coping cost of water varied with different wealth statuses [17]. Hence, it would be interesting to conduct empirical study that reflects the variations in water consumption based on social factors.…”

How valuable are environmental health interventions? Evaluation of water and sanitation programmes in India

“…We followed the methods described in the literature to compute coping costs due to inadequate water and sanitation services 15 and the private costs of waterrelated illnesses. 34 For both sets of computations, time was valued at one-half of the village-level gender-specific average hourly wage.…”

“…[23][24][25] "Revealed preference" studies, on the other hand, measure economic benefits by examining actual preventive behaviours, such as treating the water. [13][14][15][16][17][18][19]26,27 Particular types of revealed preference studies 15,16 known as avoided or coping cost studies -thus named because they examine the prevention costs incurred to cope with poor water and sanitation -measure the savings in prevention costs resulting from improvements in water and sanitation.…”