A willingness to pay for maintenance and operation of rural DWS schemes

Improved planning methodology is sought for sustainable and replicable rural water schemes. Improved methodology should have a mechanism to recover the necessary resources for operation and maintenance costs from water users. This paper analyses the differences between the users’ willingness to pay in rural markets and village DWS schemes of Nepal based on information collected through a questionnaire survey of 205 households and institutional survey of 12 DWS water user committees. Due to different socio-economic scenarios among rural villages and rural market centres, core problems in management and operation of their DWS schemes are immensely different. Weak institutional capability is the prime problem in rural village DWS schemes. On the contrary, technicalities such as insufficient water quantity and inconvenient locations of water points are the major problems in rural market centres. Moreover, users’ satisfaction level is influential for operation and maintenance of both rural DWS schemes.