Clean drinking water is one of the most fundamental human needs, yet for millions of people in Bangladesh getting safe water remains a daily challenge. The country has made remarkable strides over the decades, but persistent gaps remain, especially for communities caught between formal utility services and traditional self-supply. Besides, operation and maintenance of the utility services set up by either the government or an NGO have become challenging. Many installations have failed due to lack of O&M which resulted in reconstruction which in turn has failed. This cycle of Build-Neglect-Rebuild is one of the most critical bottlenecks that has prevented the success of innovative solutions. To tackle the issue of O&M, international development aid has also introduced different water supply management systems. Conventional community management water utility services (often charity based) have not solved the puzzle. Now a new generation of water delivery models, run by communities and private operators, is being piloted and shows promise.
How most Bangladeshis get their water today
To understand why these new models matter, it helps to know how drinking water currently reaches people in Bangladesh.
Urban areas: Utility piped water
In cities and towns, water supply is largely the responsibility of public utilities. The Dhaka Water Supply and Sewerage Authority serves around 20 million people in Dhaka, while the major cities of Chittagong, Rajshahi, Sylhet, and Khulna each have their own Water Supply and Sewerage Authorities (WASAs). Other city corporations and larger municipalities also operate piped networks — around 200 out of 329 municipalities have some form of piped water supply. Collectively, about 15% of the national population has access to piped water, according to the WHO-UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme.
These utilities draw from surface water or groundwater, treat it at centralised plants, and distribute it through household connections. However, most are severely resource-constrained — existing water tariffs barely cover routine operating costs, leaving little room for anything beyond day-to-day expenses. Major repairs depend on government budget allocations, which are neither guaranteed nor timely. The result is a maintenance culture driven by emergencies rather than planning: pipes and pumps are fixed when they fail, not before. This takes a direct toll on service quality and reliability.
In principle, this is the gold standard: treated water, reliably delivered to the doorstep. In practice, coverage remains uneven. Low-income settlements, slums, and peri-urban communities often fall outside the network entirely, and even where pipes exist, intermittent supply, pressure problems, and ageing infrastructure mean households cannot always count on what comes out of the tap.
Rural areas and unserved urban pockets: The tubewell
In rural areas — and in many urban neighbourhoods beyond the utility network — the dominant source of drinking water is the hand-operated tubewell. Over the past five decades, tubewells have transformed water access in Bangladesh: today, 84% of the population relies on them. The Department of Public Health Engineering (DPHE), alongside other government departments and NGOs, has distributed millions of tubewells across the country. In some water scarce areas, systems like household rainwater harvesting units have also been distributed. They are cheap to install, easy to maintain at a basic level, and tap into aquifers that are largely free from bacterial contamination. The shift away from open surface water, once a major driver of waterborne disease, is one of Bangladesh's quiet public health successes.
But tubewells are not without their problems. The most severe is arsenic. A large proportion of Bangladesh's shallow aquifers is naturally contaminated, and around 20 million people are estimated to be consuming water that exceeds even the national arsenic standard of 50 ppb, a limit five times higher than the WHO guideline. Beyond arsenic, iron, manganese, pathogens, and salinity affect tubewells across different parts of the country.
Operation and maintenance of tubewells is largely informal and self-managed — households or communities fix problems as they arise, if they can. There is no systematic monitoring of water quality at the point of use, meaning many families have no way of knowing whether their tubewell water is safe. The evidence on functionality is sobering: many reports indicate that 20% to 25% of publicly funded tubewells become non-functional within two years of installation. For self-supplied tubewells, the figure is somewhat better but still significant, at around 10% to 15%. When a tubewell breaks down or becomes contaminated, the burden of finding an alternative falls entirely on the household. So the picture today is one of partial coverage: utility pipes that stop at the edge of formal settlements, and tubewells that, while widespread, carry contamination risks that most households are unaware of and a functionality record that is far from reliable. It is in this gap that a new generation of demand-driven water supply models has taken root.
A new generation of water delivery models
For communities that fall through the cracks of both the utility system and the traditional tubewell (due to scarcity or poor quality of water), the answer has come from an unexpected direction: small-scale piped water schemes run either by communities themselves or by small private operators. These "mini" schemes draw water from treated supplies or deep groundwater sources and distribute it through a network of small pipes to a cluster of households or collection points. They are not large infrastructure projects — they are local, targeted solutions designed to serve the people utility pipes never reach.
Two models, in particular, have drawn attention in Bangladesh in recent years.
BRAC WASH: Water by the community, for the community
BRAC — one of the world’s largest development organisations, headquartered in Bangladesh — has for decades worked on water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) across the country. Through its WASH programme, BRAC has supported the establishment of community-managed mini piped water schemes in areas that conventional supply has failed to reach.
The basic model works like this: a water source — typically a deep tubewell that taps into arsenic-free aquifers, or in some cases a surface water treatment unit — is connected to a small distribution network serving a defined community. The scheme is not run by a government body or a private company. After construction by BRAC, a locally formed committee of community members takes responsibility for day-to-day management. They oversee operations, collect water fees from users, manage maintenance, and ensure the system stays functional. Over 50 of these schemes have been installed in remote rural locations of Haor (Sylhet, Sunamganj), coastal (Patuakhali, Bagerhat, Pirojpur) and Barind (Rajshahi, Chapainawabganj, Naogaon) areas. These are small grids with overhead tanks, each connecting 30-60 households. The supply is not 24/7; rather it supplies water three times a day.
The connections are provided to households, with often two households sharing one connection. Households need to pay about 60 to 100 taka per month based on the consumption (where connections are metered) or based on the number of members in the household (where connections are not metered). What makes this model work — and what distinguishes it from past attempts at community water management that have sometimes failed — is the emphasis on building genuine local ownership. Water committees receive training in financial management, basic maintenance, and conflict resolution. Women are often central to committee leadership, reflecting an emphasis on gender inclusion.
The community-managed model has real strengths. It is rooted in local accountability: the people running the scheme are also the ones drinking the water, which creates a powerful incentive for quality and reliability. Schemes can be set up quickly and at relatively low cost compared to extending large utility networks. And because they are embedded in the community, they can respond to local needs in ways that a distant utility cannot.
The challenges, however, are also real. Community committees are only as strong as the people and social structures behind them. Governance problems — domination by local elites, poor financial record-keeping, or simply committee members losing interest over time — can cause a scheme to deteriorate or collapse. Maintenance of pumps and pipes requires technical know-how that not every community can sustain. These are known risks, and BRAC’s programming attempts to address them, but they are not fully resolved.
Max TapWater: Bringing in the private sector
A different answer to the same problem comes from Max TapWater, an entrepreneurial entity supported by Max Foundation, providing treated piped water to communities and households that the formal utility network has not reached. It is working in Barguna, Barisal, Khulna and Patuakhali districts.
Max TapWater installs small water grid schemes with permission from the respective local government authorities. The Max TapWater model is built on a more explicitly commercial logic. Rather than relying on community committees, it employs trained staff to manage operations, maintain equipment, and collect revenues. It uses groundwater in most cases. So far, they have built over 100 such schemes. Water is treated to meet safety standards and distributed through a local pipe network. Customers pay a regular tariff for their supply. Each scheme connects about 50 households with up to three tap points per home. It aims to supply about 80 L per person per day to cover the domestic needs, with water available 24/7.
The private model has distinct advantages when it comes to sustainability and service quality. The household connections are metered, and households need to pay based on their consumption. They pay about 200 to 300 taka on average for their consumption. Willingness to pay is checked before the installation of schemes. Densely populated rural or peri-urban areas with at least 70-80 households living in a cluster, are particularly well suited to these schemes.
Professional management means that technical problems get fixed faster, financial accounts are properly maintained, and there is a business incentive to retain customers by keeping quality high. It plans to install another 30 schemes this year and upgrade existing ones. It is converting the grids into smart grids (i.e. automated operations, real-time and remote monitoring). Unlike a community committee, which can dissolve when key members move away or lose interest, a private operator has an ongoing stake in keeping the service running.
Two critical questions for any private water model are affordability and inclusion. Private operators need to recover costs and — if they are not subsidised — make a profit. This creates pressure to keep tariffs at levels that poor households may struggle to afford, or to prioritise areas where sufficient customer demand exists to make the scheme commercially viable.
Reaching the unreached: What these models have in common
Despite their differences, both the BRAC community model and the private Max TapWater model are responding to the same underlying failure: the inability of conventional systems to serve everyone. And both share some important characteristics.
First, both operate on a small scale by design. They are not trying to build city-wide infrastructure. They are serving specific communities — a cluster of households in a peri-urban settlement, a char island cut off from the mainland, a rural village that the utility network simply does not reach.
Second, both rely on some form of cost recovery from users. Water is not provided for free. This is important for sustainability: subsidised schemes that depend on external funding tend to collapse when funding runs out. But it also means that affordability cannot be an afterthought — the pricing structure must be designed with the poorest users in mind.
Third, both models face the question of regulation and quality assurance. When quality water is not supplied by a government utility, who checks that it is safe? Who holds the operator — whether a community committee or a private company — accountable if water quality falls or supply breaks down?
The governance structure of such schemes is yet to be established. There is some clear guidance for water abstraction under the water act 2013 and water rule 2018. The Department of Public Health Engineering has clear guidelines for water quality as well. However, the treatment, distribution, use (which includes tariff setting) and disposal remain unregulated.
Looking ahead
Bangladesh has come a long way in expanding access to water, but the work is far from finished. Rapid urbanisation is creating new settlements faster than utilities can extend their networks. At the same time, climate change is putting pressure on water sources, with flooding, cyclones, and saltwater intrusion in coastal areas intensifying. Meanwhile, contamination in groundwater remains an unresolved public health crisis affecting tens of millions of people.
The National Priority Target (NPT) 17, which corresponds to SDG Indicator 6.1.1, aims for 100% of the population to use safely managed drinking water services by 2030. The National Sector Development Plan for Water Supply and Sanitation reinforces this commitment.
Community-managed and private mini piped water schemes are not a replacement for strong public water systems. But in the years, perhaps decades, before those systems reach everyone, they offer a practical way of closing the access gap and extending services to those currently left behind.
The question now is how to support these models so that they work better, reach further, and serve the poorest more reliably. This will mean smarter regulation, better technical support, and a willingness to learn honestly from both successes and failures. Bangladesh has repeatedly shown its ability to solve complex problems at scale. Delivering safe water to everyone is the next challenge, and it is within reach.