Valuing Access to Drinking Water in India

Professor Fiona Burlig talks to Daniel Raimi, host of the Resources Radio podcast, about access to clean drinking water in India. Burlig outlines the serious health concerns that arise from drinking contaminated water and details an experiment she coauthored to examine the effects of a technology known as "decentralized water treatment" in the region.

Explaining the results from her paper, Burlig says:

We think that these results are really encouraging. As I was talking about earlier, even when you give out chlorine solution or chlorine tablets for free, only around 50 percent of households on average take those tablets, let alone use them.

In this study, what we're finding is when we give out our clean water for free, we're getting a take-up of around 90 percent. What's really exciting about that is it's not just a one-off offer. We ran the experiment for between five and seven months, and we're seeing consistently high take-up at the zero-cost version of the experiment.

What that suggests to us is that this approach of decentralized treatment and home delivery might overcome a lot of the barriers that have prevented people from being excited about the chlorine solution, which means it might unlock a bunch of health benefits that have been previously elusive.

Listen to the full podcast, and read the transcript, here