That is the reason that the research presented here,
based on a survey of around 700 households in Delhi,
focuses on this type of household in an endeavour
to provide a more refined assessment of the quality
dimension of an urban infrastructure. The method
adopted is to measure the consequences of unreliability
for the user of the service and for the society
by estimating the costs of unreliability, which can be
grasped by the costs of households’ compensatory
strategies to cope with the failures of the service provision.