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The Government of Punjab, through Government of India’s (GoI) Department of Economic Affairs (DEA) had requested the World Bank to provide non-lending technical assistance (NLTA) to provide high quality basic urban civic amenities to the residents of cities of Ludhiana and Amritsar in the areas of: water supply, sewerage, storm water drainage, solid waste management, and modern urban transport system. The study is expected to recommend measures and technologies to overcome the existing problems and transform the cities in to modern cities with substantially developed urban civic amenities. Capacity building, institution, and legal reforms will also be the component of the project report. After initial discussions with sector officials, a Bank team visited both Amritsar and Ludhiana cities to identify priority service level innovations and institutional challenges that have to be addressed under this NLTA for achieving desired transformative change. Currently, water supply is drawn from hundreds of unprotected bore wells across length and breadth of the city - which supply polluted water through an unplanned haphazard network. Utility, fully owned by the municipal corporation, will have operational autonomy to manage water and waste water services, whilst still be accountable to the corporation. Financial position will become clear, it can focus on becoming financially self-sustaining. The utility will make long term plans for water supply and sewage; and with government support may also be able to mobilize resources through this is unlikely in the short term in Amritsar.

From 2012 to 2014 water and sanitation service delivery assessments (SDA) have been carried out in seven selected countries in the East Asia and Pacific region under the guidance of the World Bank’s water and sanitation program and with valuable contributions of other development partners, such as United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF), WaterAid, and Asian Development Bank (ADB). Countries where SDA were carried out are Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao Peoples Democratic Republic (PDR), Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam, while in Myanmar, a broad joint sector assessment took place by World Bank, UNICEF, ADB, and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). SDA were implemented as a country-owned process led by key government agencies, and drew on the experience and methodology of similar assessments conducted in more than 40 countries (and states) in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia. It has three main components: a review of past water and sanitation access trends, a costing model to assess the adequacy of anticipated future investments, and a scorecard that allows diagnosis of bottlenecks along the service delivery pathways.

This synthesis report details the process, outputs and intermediate outcomes of the above technical assistance (TA) which was aimed at service delivery improvement in urban water and sanitation, especially to the urban poor, by: (i) supporting the government in establishing efficient, autonomous and responsive utility in Peshawar; (ii) facilitating the provincial/regional governments in formulation of water sector policies; (iii) designing demand based ‘Pakistan water sector technical advisory program’ for clients; and (iv) strengthening and aligning the urban (water) reform agenda in three provincial urban units through national urban forum.

To evaluate and reflect the sustainability of services in the region, an overall sector sustainability assessment was done taking into account four main dimensions: access to services, quality of services, efficiency of services, and financing of services. Each of these dimensions is measured through three simple and objective indicators. For each indicator, best practice values are established by looking at the best performers in the region, and the countries closest to those best performers are deemed to have a more mature sector. A more complete description of the methodology to assess sector sustainability is included in the annex of the state of the sector regional report from the Danube Water Program. The outcomes of this assessment for the Croatia water sector are displayed in Figure 9, which also shows average and best practices in the Danube region. The Croatian sector sustainability score is 72, which is above the Danube average sustainability of 64. The assessment shows that on average, the country performs well in terms of access to piped water and flush toilets, continuity of service, nonrevenue water and customer satisfaction. The main deficiencies of the Croatia water sector identified through the sector sustainability assessment are the wastewater treatment coverage and the operating cost ratio. The main challenges are: financing compliance with the European environmental acquis; ensuring affordability of future tariffs; implementing successfully the aggregation reform; and strengthening regulation in the water sector.

To evaluate and reflect the sustainability of services in the region, an overall sector maturity assessment was done taking into account four main dimensions: access to services, quality of services, efficiency of services, and financing of services. Each of these dimensions is measured through three simple and objective indicators. For each indicator, best practice values are established by looking at the best performers in the region, and countries closest to those best performers are deemed to have a more mature sector. A more complete description of the methodology to assess the sector maturity is included in the annex of the state of the sector regional report from the Danube Water Program. The outcomes of this assessment for the Austrian water sector are presented, which also shows average and best practices in the Danube region. The Austrian sector maturity score is 96, which is significantly higher than the Danube average maturity of 64, and the highest score in the region. The assessment shows that, on average, the country performs very well in terms of access to piped water and flushes toilet, wastewater treatment coverage, customer satisfaction, continuity of service, wastewater compliance, collection ratio, and nonrevenue water.

There is an urgent need to provide practical guidelines for Chinese decision makers and officials to better understand the key issues and constraints related to rural wastewater management and to identify feasible solutions and tools to improve the performance and sustainability of these projects. To address these needs, the World Bank has developed this guide for wastewater management in rural villages in China. The Guide is intended to be a useful resource for Chinese policy makers and practitioners. It includes a review of historical and current policies and practices related to wastewater management in rural China. The Guide outlines a framework and strategies for establishing municipal and village level wastewater management programs. The overall objective of the guide is to identify key issues and to present effective strategies and approaches to implement sustainable wastewater management programs at the local jurisdictions in order to improve rural sanitation in China. A key objective of the guide is to present institutional, programmatic and technical guidelines that can be adopted by local jurisdictions, forming the basis for consistent, affordable, practical, and effective sanitation project planning, design, implementation, and operations.

The objective of this report is to identify and evaluate best practices in smallholder private irrigation in West Africa. The report is based on a comparative assessment of the smallholder private irrigation subsector in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Nigeria, which included a literature review, field visits, and workshops at both national and regional levels. The task lists for the assessment is provided in annex one. This report first presents the main features of smallholder irrigation and the development projects that have promoted its use in West Africa in chapter two. The authors then describe the low-cost technologies available for this type of irrigation, including drilling, pumping, and water distribution in chapter three. Chapter four reviews the successes and remaining challenges of the development projects involving smallholder private irrigation in West Africa. Chapter five draws the lessons learned from these experiences and proposes recommendations for future investments, including more support to the development of a supply-chain for low-cost irrigation technologies, the adoption of a programmatic approach, and the necessity for a comprehensive investment package including environmental impact mitigation to sustainably support smallholder irrigators.

This paper provides an overview of major groundwater issues for Sub-Saharan Africa, with an assessment of their policy implications in terms of potential development and appropriate management. In terms of construction time, capital outlay and drought resilience, groundwater is the preferred source to meet most water-supply demands, despite hydro geological complexity, natural constraints on water well yields and quality, and institutional weaknesses. The 'new developmental agenda' relates to improving urban water-supply security and expanding irrigated agriculture to meet these challenges many countries need to undertake strategic assessment of their groundwater and prioritize investment on institutional strengthening so as to facilitate appropriately-managed groundwater development. Without effective use of available groundwater resources, improved livelihoods and climate-change adaptation will prove much more difficult to achieve.

The report looks critically at the water resources and the current and projected future water demands in the Southern Gobi Region (SGR) using the widely dispersed data and information that are currently available. An important conclusion of the report is that almost all the significant sources of groundwater in the SGR are 'fossil' or 'non-renewable', meaning that they are finite resources which cannot be replenished. Not only will that, but pumping water out of these fosil aquifers tend to cause a drop in the groundwater levels above them. The report proposes practical steps by which water resources development and management could be managed to best serve economic and infrastructure development while giving attention to environmental protection and service to communities in the SGR. The report also highlights the urgent need for more data. A more detailed picture of the distribution and quantity of the groundwater would give planners first, a better idea of both the limits to the growth of the SGR; and, second, of the future water demands, its spatial distribution, quality requirements, and the possibilities to increase water use efficiency and water re-use. Thus there is a need to bring all information and data together to form the basis for rational planning.

The aim of this paper is to provide a strategic overview of a decade of experience in supporting public administrations in their efforts to confront excessive groundwater resource exploitation for agricultural irrigation. Special emphasis is put on a series of on-the-ground pilot projects mainly in South and East Asia and Latin America, which are profiled through a series of boxes introduced in the paper. In these pilots' appropriate packages of technical, economic, institutional and social measures, in the main selected through use of a 'pragmatic framework' for groundwater resource management, have been introduced with agreement of stakeholders in an attempt to promote more sustainable groundwater use in agricultural irrigation. They have achieved varying degrees of success but do provide hope and orientation for the future in this important aspect of water resource management.