DEVELOPMENT OF SUSTAINABILITY CRITERIA FOR URBAN DRINKING WATER SYSTEMS USING ANALYTIC HIERARCHY PROCESS (AHP)

This study aims at developing a procedure by integrating sustainability criteria for Urban Drinking Water Systems (UDWS) and determine their relative importance in quantitative terms. In this study, the technical, environmental, economic, social and institutional criteria were identified and sub divided into factors and sub-factors to aid in evaluating sustainability of UDWSs. Expert stakeholders, belonging to all the fields of expertise relevant to UDWSs, were involved to acquire their opinion as an input, to estimate relative weight for these criteria. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was applied to transfigure the subjectivities of opinion into numeric values. Based on the outcomes of this study, environmental criterion was deemed to be the most important, with a sustainability score of 27.86%, even though more than 80% of the respondents belonged to the non-environmental group. On the other hand, institutional criteria acquired the least i.e., 14.11% weightage. The same trend was observed in case of relative weights of the different factors. The water source quality attained the highest priority of 14.89%, followed by source capacity and social awareness, securing 12.97% and 10.74% weightage respectively. Institutional capacity was assigned the least weightage with 5.94% of overall sustainability score. The results conclude that environmental aspect of UDWSs is of core significance for sustainability of overall system. Inability to maintain source quality and capacity may seriously compromise the ability of system to sustain. Moreover, social aspects may not be ignored during policy making, designing, executing and maintaining the infrastructure for a sustainable UDWS.