Isha Ray

Information and Communication Technologies for Development: The Bottom of the Pyramid Model in Practice

The currently influential model for information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) is based on increasing the well-being of the poor through market-based solutions, and by using low-cost but advanced technologies. Using ethnographic methods, we chart out the contradictions that could arise when such a development-through-entrepreneurship model is implemented. We examine the Akshaya project, a franchise of computer-service kiosks in Kerala, India, which strives simultaneously for social development through access to computers and financial viability through cost recovery and entrepreneurship. We show that tensions within the state and among entrepreneurs and perceptions of public versus private among consumers make it challenging to meet the twin goals of commercial profitability and social development.

Integrating Social Development and Financial Sustainability: The Challenges of Rural Computer Kiosks in Kerala

This paper examines the social and political challenges related to the implementation of information and communication technology (ICT) kiosk projects for rural development in India. Specifically, the paper focuses on the Akshaya project, a franchise of rural computer-service kiosks, which was implemented in Kerala as a public-private sector collaboration. The Akshaya project has the twin goals of social development through increased access to computers for rural people and financial viability through market-driven entrepreneurship. Using interview and participant observation methods, we examine the challenges that state actors and entrepreneurs face in simultaneously addressing social and financial sustainability. The preliminary evidence suggests that there is a tension between these goals at a macro level (within the state) and a micro level (for entrepreneurs and potential consumers) that makes it difficult to run a financially self-sustaining ICT kiosk project that also meets social development goals. The paper demonstrates that the implementation of ICTs for development is not simply a technical process of delivering services to the poor, but is a highly political process that involves tradeoffs and prioritization of particular goals to attain sustainability. Branding this project is a challenge for the state and entrepreneurs due to consumer perceptions of what development is, with particular expectations of state provided services, versus what business is

Social Disparities in Nitrate-Contaminated Drinking Water in California’s San Joaquin Valley

Background: Research on drinking water in the United States has rarely examined disproportionate exposures to contaminants faced by low-income and minority communities. This study analyzes the relationship between nitrate concentrations in community water systems (CWSs) and the racial/ethnic and socioeconomic characteristics of customers. Objectives: We hypothesized that CWSs in California’s San Joaquin Valley that serve a higher proportion of minority or residents of lower socioeconomic status have higher nitrate levels and that these disparities are greater among smaller drinking water systems. Methods: We used water quality monitoring data sets (1999–2001) to estimate nitrate levels in CWSs, and source location and census block group data to estimate customer demographics. Our linear regression model included 327 CWSs and reported robust standard errors clustered at the CWS level. Our adjusted model controlled for demographics and water system characteristics and stratified by CWS size. Results: Percent Latino was associated with a 0.04-mg nitrate-ion (NO3)/L increase in a CWS’s estimated NO3 concentration [95% confidence interval (CI), –0.08 to 0.16], and rate of home ownership was associated with a 0.16-mg NO3/L decrease (95% CI, –0.32 to 0.002). Among smaller systems, the percentage of Latinos and of homeownership was associated with an estimated increase of 0.44 mg NO3/L (95% CI, 0.03–0.84) and a decrease of 0.15 mg NO3/L (95% CI, –0.64 to 0.33), respectively. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that in smaller water systems, CWSs serving larger percentages of Latinos and renters receive drinking water with higher nitrate levels. This suggests an environmental inequity in drinking water quality.

Environmental justice implications of arsenic contamination in California’s San Joaquin Valley: a cross-sectional, cluster-design examining exposure and compliance in community drinking water systems

BackgroundFew studies of environmental justice examine inequities in drinking water contamination. Those studies that have done so usually analyze either disparities in exposure/harm or inequitable implementation of environmental policies. The US EPA’s 2001 Revised Arsenic Rule, which tightened the drinking water standard for arsenic from 50 μg/L to 10 μg/L, offers an opportunity to analyze both aspects of environmental justice.MethodsWe hypothesized that Community Water Systems (CWSs) serving a higher proportion of minority residents or residents of lower socioeconomic status (SES) have higher drinking water arsenic levels and higher odds of non-compliance with the revised standard. Using water quality sampling data for arsenic and maximum contaminant level (MCL) violation data for 464 CWSs actively operating from 2005–2007 in California’s San Joaquin Valley we ran bivariate tests and linear regression models.ResultsHigher home ownership rate was associated with lower arsenic levels (ß-coefficient= −0.27 μg As/L, 95% (CI), -0.5, -0.05). This relationship was stronger in smaller systems (ß-coefficient= −0.43, CI, -0.84, -0.03). CWSs with higher rates of homeownership had lower odds of receiving an MCL violation (OR, 0.33; 95% CI, 0.16, 0.67); those serving higher percentages of minorities had higher odds (OR, 2.6; 95% CI, 1.2, 5.4) of an MCL violation.ConclusionsWe found that higher arsenic levels and higher odds of receiving an MCL violation were most common in CWSs serving predominantly socio-economically disadvantaged communities. Our findings suggest that communities with greater proportions of low SES residents not only face disproportionate arsenic exposures, but unequal MCL compliance challenges.

Wastewater for agriculture: A reuse-oriented planning model and its application in peri-urban China

The benefits of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) are widely known but its recommendations remain thinly implemented. Designing wastewater treatment plants for reuse in irrigation is a particularly underutilized IWRM opportunity that could potentially increase agricultural yields, conserve surface water, offset chemical fertilizer demand, and reduce the costs of wastewater treatment by eliminating nutrient removal processes. This paper presents a novel planning model, consisting of a reuse-centric performance assessment and optimization model to help design wastewater treatment plants for reuse in agriculture. The performance assessment and optimization model are described, and their coupled application is demonstrated in the peri-urban district of Pixian, China. Based on the results of the performance assessment, two reuse scenarios are evaluated: wastewater to supplement business as usual (BAU) irrigation, and wastewater to replace BAU irrigation. The results indicate that wastewater supplementation could increase profits by

An integrated method for evaluating community-based safe water programmes and an application in rural Mexico

20 million (M) annually; alternatively, wastewater replacement could conserve 35Mm(3) of water in local rivers each year.

The Drinking Water Disparities Framework: On the Origins and Persistence of Inequities in Exposure

The burden of diarrhoeal disease remains high in the developing world. Community-based safe drinking water programmes are being promoted as cost-effective interventions that will help reduce this illness burden. However, the effectiveness of these programmes remains under-investigated. The primary argument of this paper is that the biological exposure reductions underlying safe water interventions vary tremendously over space and time, and studies that only report results of intent-to-treat analyses cannot reveal why such programmes succeed or fail. The paper develops a stepwise evaluation framework to characterize, and so analyse, the technical, financial, social and behavioural factors that underlie exposure and mediate the impact of safe water investments. Relevant factors include physical performance of the water system, community capacity to maintain and manage the systems, and the time and budget constraints of households participating in the programme. The approach draws on the public health, community-based resource management, and household choice literatures to identify modifiable points of failure along the causal pathway to programme impact. The evaluation framework is used to assess the performance and impact of UVWaterworks, a community-based water purification system in rural Mexico, 5 years after the programme began. No impact on diarrhoea incidence was found in this case. The assessment method revealed that (a) household priorities and preferences were a key factor in maintaining exposure to safe drinking water sources, and therefore (b) user convenience was a primary leverage point for programme improvement. The findings indicate that a comprehensive examination of the many factors that influence the performance and impact of safe water programmes is necessary to elucidate why these programmes fail or succeed.

Methodological Approaches to the Question of the Commons

With this article, we develop the Drinking Water Disparities Framework to explain environmental injustice in the context of drinking water in the United States. The framework builds on the social epidemiology and environmental justice literatures, and is populated with 5 years of field data (2005-2010) from Californias San Joaquin Valley. We trace the mechanisms through which natural, built, and sociopolitical factors work through state, county, community, and household actors to constrain access to safe water and to financial resources for communities. These constraints and regulatory failures produce social disparities in exposure to drinking water contaminants. Water system and household coping capacities lead, at best, to partial protection against exposure. This composite burden explains the origins and persistence of social disparities in exposure to drinking water contaminants.

Upgrading a Piped Water Supply from Intermittent to Continuous Delivery and Association with Waterborne Illness: A Matched Cohort Study in Urban India

In this essay we argue that the key barriers to interdisciplinary work between economists and anthropologists are differences of methodology and epistemology—in what the two disciplines consider important to explain and how they evaluate the criteria for a good explanation. The essay is an introduction to three articles, on economics, anthropology, and the question of the commons, that illustrate some of these differences and that suggest both the potential and the pitfalls of trying to bridge these methodological gaps. Our goal is not somehow to resolve the differences. Rather, we are motivated by the belief that understanding what is important to the other discipline, and seeing the differences in the light of that understanding, is important for interdisciplinary work and for respectful conversation. We have highlighted three dichotomies that are emblematic of some of these differences: autonomy versus embeddedness, outcomes versus processes, and parsimony versus complexity. We hope that our discussion leads economists and anthropologists to reexamine the assumptions and modes of analysis that prevail within the disciplines and to open up new conversations in new directions.

Public versus private: Does it matter for water conservation? Insights from California

Background Intermittent delivery of piped water can lead to waterborne illness through contamination in the pipelines or during household storage, use of unsafe water sources during intermittencies, and limited water availability for hygiene. We assessed the association between continuous versus intermittent water supply and waterborne diseases, child mortality, and weight for age in Hubli-Dharwad, India. Methods and Findings We conducted a matched cohort study with multivariate matching to identify intermittent and continuous supply areas with comparable characteristics in Hubli-Dharwad. We followed 3,922 households in 16 neighborhoods with children <5 y old, with four longitudinal visits over 15 mo (Nov 2010–Feb 2012) to record caregiver-reported health outcomes (diarrhea, highly credible gastrointestinal illness, bloody diarrhea, typhoid fever, cholera, hepatitis, and deaths of children <2 y old) and, at the final visit, to measure weight for age for children <5 y old. We also collected caregiver-reported data on negative control outcomes (cough/cold and scrapes/bruises) to assess potential bias from residual confounding or differential measurement error. Continuous supply had no significant overall association with diarrhea (prevalence ratio [PR] = 0.93, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.83–1.04, p = 0.19), bloody diarrhea (PR = 0.78, 95% CI: 0.60–1.01, p = 0.06), or weight-for-age z-scores (Δz = 0.01, 95% CI: −0.07–0.09, p = 0.79) in children <5 y old. In prespecified subgroup analyses by socioeconomic status, children <5 y old in lower-income continuous supply households had 37% lower prevalence of bloody diarrhea (PR = 0.63, 95% CI: 0.46–0.87, p-value for interaction = 0.03) than lower-income intermittent supply households; in higher-income households, there was no significant association between continuous versus intermittent supply and child diarrheal illnesses. Continuous supply areas also had 42% fewer households with ≥1 reported case of typhoid fever (cumulative incidence ratio [CIR] = 0.58, 95% CI: 0.41–0.78, p = 0.001) than intermittent supply areas. There was no significant association with hepatitis, cholera, or mortality of children <2 y old; however, our results were indicative of lower mortality of children <2 y old (CIR = 0.51, 95% CI: 0.22–1.07, p = 0.10) in continuous supply areas. The major limitations of our study were the potential for unmeasured confounding given the observational design and measurement bias from differential reporting of health symptoms given the nonblinded treatment. However, there was no significant difference in the prevalence of the negative control outcomes between study groups that would suggest undetected confounding or measurement bias. Conclusions Continuous water supply had no significant overall association with diarrheal disease or ponderal growth in children <5 y old in Hubli-Dharwad; this might be due to point-of-use water contamination from continuing household storage and exposure to diarrheagenic pathogens through nonwaterborne routes. Continuous supply was associated with lower prevalence of dysentery in children in low-income households and lower typhoid fever incidence, suggesting that intermittently operated piped water systems are a significant transmission mechanism for Salmonella typhi and dysentery-causing pathogens in this urban population, despite centralized water treatment. Continuous supply was associated with reduced transmission, especially in the poorer higher-risk segments of the population.