I recently met a number of village community leaders and innovators who had achieved remarkable results in collaboration with the Water and Sanitation Management Organisation in Gujarat in dealing with the problems of drinking water and sanitation.

If through transparency, honesty and self-critical attitude, public officials can achieve so much in this programme, then lessons need to be learned so that other programmes can also benefit from similar processes. It is a pity that NREGA funds cannot be transferred to Wasmo for implementation: we could have avoided so much corruption and misuse and ensured much higher productivity through genuine community participation.

Let me recount some grassroots innovations which made us aware of the range of creative responses communities have shown in dealing with variable topographies, water level, pressure, distribution requirements and so on.

Where else will you see an old widow, Doodhiben in Bhavnagar district, contributing her lifelong savings for the creation of a common water supply facility, or another lady, Ambaben, donating for a similar purpose the amount she had saved for her last rites?management

When it was realised by some farmers that the guidelines provided for making a chamber for controlling water supply underground invariably lead to water collection which led to dirtiness and mosquito breeding, they decided to make a chamber above the ground. The programme managers did not have a problem with that. In another village, the source of water and the pump were eight km away from the village, and going there every time power came would have been tiresome. Why not use the mobile phone switch on/off system along with a status report on whether power was available or not, and if so in how many phases? The whole village could send an SMS to that water supply phone and get to know when the water would be supplied. All automatic.

We had a similar innovation in the National Innovation Foundation (NIF) database but this one was surely meeting local needs well and was developed by local people through their own ingenuity. In another place, the local community developed water supply points ensuring that every household in every locality got water at the same pressure. Even in this, to calibrate the pressure, they would keep a regulatory point which was sealed after testing it for 15 days. Nobody could change the pressure or add a water point or cheat the system. The additional cost of this system was over Rs 1 lakh, but the equity does not come cheap.

I wish various developmental programmes study the way people have decided to pay more amount (as much as Rs 600 per household per year or Rs 14 per capita per month in some villages) for water. Let us find out how much we pay in cities, how many housing societies deliver water at the same pressure to everybody.

There are many more innovative examples of water conservation, distribution and utilisation which we are studying to draw lessons for participatory development. It is not for nothing that the Rajasthan assembly speaker came along with MLAs and chief water supply engineers to study how Gujarat had done this miracle.

That also shows when best practices will be learned across party political lines, nothing will come in the way of overcoming the shame of this nation, which cannot provide safe drinking water to thousands of villages after so many years of independence. Gujarat will have solved this problem soon and for good.

But on the sanitation front, there is still a long way to go. While thousands of toilets have been built, there is still a need to persuade people to understand that microbial load in water in many places is very high because of contamination of catchments. We need to create a consciousness that every drop of water counts. Not one tap should leak, not one drop should drip. Every village community has to clean the catchments from where water drains into the water body before rains. And reverse osmosis (RO) water needs to be re-mineralised, otherwise there will be a major micro-nutrient crisis and public health problem.