Woman waited in line to fill water containers at a slum in Saidabad, near Hyderabad, March 20, 2007.
India’s water supplies might be drying up and the government is
finally waking up to that fact. The question remains, though, if its
efforts will be sufficient to avert a possible crisis.
India has more than 17% of the world’s population, but has a mere 4%
of the world’s renewable water resources and 2.6% of the world’s land
area.
New Delhi is finally beginning to realize the precariousness of those statistics. The Ministry of Water Resources earlier this year drafted a national water policy outlining a framework for the country.
Some of the key concerns that the policy raises include:
- Large parts of India have already become water stressed. Rapid
growth in demand for water pose serious challenges to water security.
- Access to safe drinking water still continues to be a problem in
some areas. Skewed availability of water between different regions and
different people in the same regions is iniquitous and has the potential
of causing social unrest.
- Groundwater is still perceived as an individual property and is
exploited inequitably and without any consideration to its
sustainability leading to its over-exploitation in several areas.
- Inter-state, inter-regional disputes in sharing of water hamper the optimum utilization of water.
These are among the issues that will likely be addressed during “India Water Week,” a three-day conference organized by India’s Ministry of Water Resources starting Tuesday.
The water ministry is set to release a set of recommendations based
on the draft water policy as early as this week. But what do experts
make of the draft so far?
This is a more comprehensive policy than the one currently in place
because, in a first, the government is waking up to the fact that water
can be depleted, says Sunil Sinha, head and senior economist at Crisil
Ltd., a rating agency owned by Standard & Poor’s. Mr. Sinha authored
a recent report on how corporate India needs to embrace for an
impending water crisis and switch to sustainable water practices.
“Whenever the issue of water has been discussed in the Indian
context, most of the discussion was on augmenting the water resources,”
says Mr. Sinha. “The conversation always is that the supply doesn’t meet
the demand and how do we increase the supply. One good thing about this
policy is that it’s recognizing that water is not an unlimited
resource.”
Water, the draft says, should be treated as an economic good so as to promote its conservation and efficient us. It
needs to be managed as a community resource held, by the state, under a
public trust doctrine to achieve food security, livelihood, and
equitable and sustainable development for all.
The draft adds that each state should establish a system for a water
tariff and have in place a criteria to charge for water. And it
acknowledges one of the pet peeves of a lot of planners: a lot of water,
and electricity, is wasted because electricity is heavily under priced
by several governments and this, it says, needs to be reversed.
But not everyone is impressed.
“It is not the absence of money, expertise or water because of which
[Indians] have such a poor service,” says Prof. Asit Biswas, president
of the Third World Center for Water Management in Mexico, and a water
expert who has been advising governments and companies on their water
management for several years. “It is simply bad planning and management.
India may be an emerging economic power, but its urban water and
wastewater management is akin to that of a banana republic.”
Prof. Biswas says many of the ideas in the new draft were promoted in the previous policy but were never implemented.
“In case of India, the ideological discussion as to who provides the
water, public or private sector, is a red herring,” says Prof. Biswas.
Currently less than 1% of India’s population receives water from the
private sector. And even under the most optimistic scenario, he says,
this number will remain under 10% even by 2030.
“The main question India should be asking is how to improve the
dismal performance of the public sector since even in 20 years´ time
more than 90% of the Indians will be receiving water from the public
sector,” he says.
The country needs to make some tough decisions but lacks the
political will, he says.
“Equally, unfortunately, the Indian public is
so used to a third class water service for generations that it accepts
this third-grade service without any complaint.”
Prof. Biswas says the country can start with three immediate changes:
replace career bureaucrats who head water utilities with professional,
technically knowledgeable managers, who can spend at least six years
running the utility so that they have enough time to develop and
implement a plan; price all water, and have special tariffs for the poor
who shouldn’t pay more than 2% of their household income (“free water
is a sure recipe for a third grade delivery service,” he says); remove
the excess fat from Indian utilities so that they can turn around to
become financially viable.
(To be fair, the draft does say that states should establish a water tariff.)
Crisil’s Mr. Sinha is not as pessimistic about the draft in its
current form. He says he is encouraged that the government is realizing
that it can’t really increase the supply of water and will have to make
more judicious use of water and focus on water wastage. “Here is a lot
of movement forward,” he says.
By Megha Bahree@The Wall Street Journal
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