Role of Government in Providing Public Facilities

Public facilities are essential facilities for everyone, such as water, healthcare, electricity, public transport, schools, etc. The government plays a crucial role in their provision, and once it is provided, its benefits can be shared by many people.

Role of Government

One of the government’s most essential responsibilities is to ensure that these public facilities are accessible to everyone. The government must shoulder this responsibility because:

• Public facilities are not for profit: Private companies operate for profit in the market. For example, they will not get any direct benefit for keeping the drains clean
• Availability and Affordability: In areas of the private sector like schools and hospitals, the service is not available to all at an affordable rate 
• Basic Needs: Public facilities are related to people’s basic needs. Any modern society requires that these facilities be provided to meet people’s basic needs
• Fundamental Rights: The Right to Life that the Constitution guarantees is for all persons living in the country

Financing Public Facilities

• In the Budget, the government announces the various ways in which it plans to meet its expenses
• The primary source of revenue for the government is the taxes collected from the people. The government has the authority to collect these taxes and put them towards such initiatives
• For example, to supply water, the public authority needs to bring about costs in siphoning water, conveying it over significant distances, setting downpipes for circulation, and so forth
• It partially covers these consumptions by gathering different duties and charging an expense for water to a limited extent

Water as a Public Facility

• Importance of Water:
  • Water is essential for life and good health
  • Many water-related ailments can be avoided by drinking safe water: India has the highest number of instances of diarrhoea, dysentery, and cholera. (Water-related diseases claim the lives of over 1,600 Indians every day, the majority of whom are youngsters under the age of five.)
• Constitutional mandate: The Constitution of India recognizes the Right to Water as being a part of the rights under Article 21. This means that it is the right of every person, whether rich or poor, to have enough water to fulfil daily needs at an affordable price
• Judicial Intervention:
  • Right to Safe drinking water is a Fundamental Right: It has been held by the High Courts and Supreme Court in several court cases
  • While hearing a case based on a letter made by a villager in Mahbubnagar district about the contamination of drinking water in the year 2007, the Andhra Pradesh High Court reiterated this. The textile industry was pouring dangerous chemicals into a stream near his hamlet, poisoning groundwater used for irrigation and drinking
  • The court ordered the Mahbubnagar district collector to provide each person in the area with 25 litres of water

Glaring Situation of Water supply by local bodies in India

• In Chennai, Municipal supply meets only about half the needs of the people of the city
• The poor are severely affected by water shortages
  
  Great inequalities in water use exist, as shown in Table below:

• Other cities in India experience similar shortages and major crises throughout the summer months.

Some people argue that since the public authority can’t supply the measure of water that is required and many of the civil water offices are running confused, privately owned businesses ought to be permitted to assume control over the undertaking of water supply.

The private sector in Water Supply

• Water supply is a government duty all around the world. There are only a few examples of private water supplies
• In some parts of the world, such as Porto Alegre (Brazil), public water delivery has been made universal
• When the responsibility for water supply was transferred to private companies in a few cases, the price of water rocketed, making it unaffordable for many
• Huge protests erupted in cities around the world, with riots breaking out in places like Bolivia, forcing the government to reclaim the service from private hands

Success Stories of Government Water Departments in India

• Mumbai: The water supply department raises enough money through water charges to cover its expenses on supplying water
• Hyderabad: The urban body has increased coverage and improved performance in revenue collection
• Chennai: Much rainwater gathering programs have been launched to boost groundwater levels. It has also used private enterprises to carry and distribute water, but the government’s water supply department sets the pricing and grants authorization to operate water tankers

Public Transport as Public facility

• Buses are the most common mode of short-distance public transportation. For the vast majority of working people, it is their primary connection to their workplace
• As an alternative to buses, the government has planned and executed ambitious metro rail projects for most metropolitan cities as an alternative to buses

Sanitation, as a Public facility

• Sanitation is essential in the prevention of water-borne infections, in addition to clean drinking water, and it also falls under Article 21
• In India, Sanitation coverage is even lower than that of clean water. Official figures for 2011 show that 87 percent of the households in India have access to drinking water, and about 53 percent have access to sanitation (toilet facilities within the premises of residence)