Congratulations to Professor Srinivasa Chary and his colleagues at ASCI, Hyderabad for re-launching the Change Management Forum which, together with Kevin Sansom at WEDC, the three of us first started in 2002
The first edition of 'Change Management Times' (perhaps it should have been called 'Ahead of its Times') also included this ironic cartoon:
As I've written about before on this blog, following on from the long time lag from the Karnataka 24x7 projects in 2008 approx (we had launched the 24x7 concept at the Bangaluru CMF meeting later in 2002), Odisha is now making impressive progressive in rolling out 24x7 continuous potable water in Bhuvaneswar and Puri.
Chary's relaunch of CMF 2.0 has just commenced with a Leadership Webinar which included a Keynote from Shri Mathi Vathanan, Permanent Secretary of HUDD, Government of Odisha (a man with amazing vision and drive - his mantra being 'what is the timeline for delivering this?', whatever 'this' might be in that particular meeting and then shortening the timeline).
I had the privilege of sharing issues about 'achieving scale' to which I added 'with sustainability', this being the key role of IRC & UNICEF in the Odisha programme.
As part of that global overview I shared the figure below, per person served annual investment costs in England and Wales, converted to Indian Rupees at 2020 Purchasing Power Parity prices .... this to remind everybody of the cost of sustaining water supply, it is not just a matter of building and delivering the initial water connections to every house .... though of course without that start nothing else happens. The yellow box indicates the privatisation era of England and Wales' water investment, very much a 'catch-up' period following initial public investment, followed by a mid '80s drop when the public sector began to ignore capital maintenance needs.
And a final slide to share here (I believe the Webinars are available on YouTube), with what I like to think is a fun animation in the original powerpoint presentation, summarising my understanding of sustainability:
Which is that if you want to get past the 'intermittent poor quality water - only piped to middle and upper-income households - it is necessary to get beyond the level of a 'Just enough' utility by harnessing political commitment, built into the process through the use of economic regulating, and through customer engagement, particularly in the context of all customers being responsible for avoiding wastage and leakage of water, as well as contributing to revenue for opex needs, according to affordability.
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