DEVELOPMENT-INDIA: Poor Governance Boosts Water Privatisation

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

CHENNAI, India, Apr 2 2002 (IPS) - Privatising water supply holds no new terrors for the inhabitants of this southern Indian city, who are resigned to uncertain supplies of a once freely available natural resource that is now fast turning into a commodity.

“We don’t mind paying some money as we are not made to waste hours waiting in a queue just for a few litres of water,” says Kamalam as she balances a plastic container designed to fit neatly on her hip after it is filled with the precious stuff.

Hours spent at the filling up at the water tanker or water pump means time away from household chores and neglect of small children for women like Kamalam, who take the brunt of water shortages in the city.

It was not very long ago that water merchants discovered a natural aquifer on the road to Mahabalipuram, famed for its 7th century stone temples, and made huge profits by moving the water in tankers be sold in the thirsty city. But the mining rapidly lowered the water table in the city.

According to Shanta Sheela Nair, the topmost bureaucrat in southern Tamil Nadu state’s water department, it took strict enforcement of anti-water mining legislation coupled with support from local communities to stop the mining.

And now, Nair is busy encouraging residents to replace the water they have been pumping out of the earth by installing rainwater harvesting systems wherever possible. “It is far cheaper than people think – I have had one installed in my home for less than ten dollars,” she said.

Indian law holds that groundwater is not a common, community resource but belongs to the landowner. This has resulted in the uncontrolled use of borewell technology which, apart from lowering the water table, has also caused water supplies to become heavily loaded with dissolved salt, fluorine and arsenic.

But there are other causes of acute water shortages that are now a feature of many of India’s cities urban settlements, among them inadequate efforts at water conservation, inefficient water use and the denial of control over water resources to local communities.

“What is worse than fluorine and arsenic is sheer bad governance,” declared L C Jain, former vice-chairman of the World Commission on Dams at a workshop on water policy in the city last week sponsored by the World Bank.

Jain, a former member of India’s powerful Planning Commission, says that what India now needs is a massive rainwater harvesting programme carried out by empowered ‘panchayats’ or local bodies.

“As a first step, the Water Resources Ministry must be wound up and replaced by a board which would oversee regionally equitable development of land and water resources, especially in drought-prone areas,” Jain said.

At the moment, Jain said, there is heavy concentration of official enthusiasm and investment in major and medium irrigation projects, which are dependent on a corrupt system that enriched private contractors.

Jain said he was not surprised to that India has little to show for the 50 billion dollars it has so far spent on developing water resources and another 7.5 billion dollars on drinking water.

“Even the repeated severe strictures of Parliamentary committees have failed to make a dent on the grossly distorted pattern of investment on water resources by the Water Resources Ministry,” the distinguished former planner said.

Jain was not exaggerating. A report brought out three years ago by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) said India faced a massive water crisis not because of natural factors but because of poor water resources management.

On Monday, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said the government was inclined to recognise the community as the “rightful custodian of water” and that the present “exclusive control by the government” had to go.

But as the government gets out of the, way the debate has swung to who should ideally handle water resources — local, democratically elected bodies or private companies, including international players keen to get into a virtually untouched area in a country of over a billion people.

According to Anand Kumar, chief executive officer of the Netherlands-based water resources transnational corporation (TNC) Ondeo, outfits like his do not trade in water, but provide services to clean water, deliver it to homes and then recycle it for safe return to the environment.

Kumar is confident that such services would be a boon to people who have to stand for hours in long queues to get a bucket of water, like Kamalam, or wake up in the middle of the night to fill up from taps in their homes that depend on municipal supplies.

Junaid Ahmed, who heads the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Programme, says that what is needed urgently is to dispel the popular feeling that water comes from heaven and is free and so there is no need for a paying infrastructure that private companies naturally insist on.

Ahmed says recent surveys in Bangladesh have shown that people there were against uncertain government water supply and preferred to depend on their own arsenic-ridden borewells — simply because it mimicked the convenience of 24-hour on-tap supplies.

According to Kumar, people were willing to pay so long as they were assured that they would actually get the water supplies they were paying for. He added that it was virtually impossible to get a government department in a South Asian country to be accountable for access to water.