There is no water in Kiran Sarna’s house for the past three days. Sarna, who lives in a posh Delhi neighbourhood calls up the Delhi Water Board emergency centre thrice a day but so far there has been no response. "The situation is so bad that I have no water even in the toilets. My house is stinking. Is 200 litres every day too much to ask for?" an angry Sarna lashed out before a local reporter.
Sarna is not the only angry one in the city. And Delhiites are not unique in their plight. As temperatures soar, tempers are rising across South Asia about water - or the lack of it.
The good news is that the deepening water crisis in the region is triggering civic action and a growing awareness about the linkage between poverty and clean water. Residents of 14 water-short neighbourhoods in Delhi are threatening to go to court to force the government to do something about their plight. Elsewhere a debate has started at long last among policy makes about new ways of looking at water institutions.
One South Asian city which is trying to forge new institutional arrangements to relieve the residents’ water woes is Chennai (formerly Madras) in southern India. During the summers of 1993, 2000 and 2001, water-scarce Chennai was in crisis mode. Memories of dry taps, long waits on the streets in the scorching sun for tanker lorries are still fresh.
Recently the city hosted a workshop where journalists from different countries in South Asia, administrators, international civil servants, NGOs and private water company executives shared ideas about new approaches to dealing with the worsening urban water crisis in the region.
Chennai’s success and failure to tackle its problems provided the launching board for a wider debate on what other cities in the region can do. Interesting features about Chennai, for instance, include sale of water by private tankers but regulated by the state-owned Metrowater under the Madras Metropolitan Ground Water Regulation Act; provision of free water to the poor residents of the city; extraction of groundwater by households (at high costs) to supplement private water supply; reuse of sewage by two major industries, thus saving valuable groundwater and reducing pollution. Over-extraction of groundwater has already led to ingress of seawater followed by aquifer pumping. Chennai also is proactively pushing rainwater harvesting to conserve groundwater.
"Safe water", stressed Goursankar Ghosh, executive director of the Geneva-based Water and Sanitation Collaboration Council , "means less disease , improved nutrition and better education. Without moving water and sanitation on top of the political agenda, you cannot tackle poverty."
Today, with a growing population, rising demand, and a lagging water supply, cash-strapped South Asian governments are confronted with stark choices. Overload on water sources, improper waste disposal, contamination of rivers and streams, reckless extraction of ground water from depleted aquifers and a long list of management deficiencies in service and delivery characterise cities in this rapidly urbanising region.
The rich and the middle class have found their private solutions to the problem: bottled water, household filtering systems, borewells. The poor pay the highest bill for lack of access to clean drinking water and adequate sanitation - death, disease , not to mention the opportunity cost measured in terms of the time and energy spent collecting water from distant sources, inevitably by women and girls.
With safe water supply access at 87 per cent, South Asia is ahead of Sub-Saharan Africa which holds the global record for lowest drinking water access (54 %).
But the situation on the ground is vastly different from what the figures suggest. Water supply access does not mean water availability. "Leave alone a 24-hour water supply. Most of us would be happy with a reliable amount of water at specific times during the day," confessed a civil servant attending the Chennai workshop.
Even when water is available, there is no guarantee of quality. Contamination of groundwater with arsenic is the biggest public health problem in Bangladesh. In many parts of the Indian sub-continent, fluoride and other toxins are beginning to be found in the groundwater.
Ironically, even as local governments plead lack of cash to improve water supply, most South Asian cities are leaking buckets. In Chennai, water lines are old and creaky, just like most cities in the region. Water leakage ranges from 25-30 per cent. Delhi which experiences a shortage of 150 million gallons per day wastes 20 per cent of water through leakage and another 4 to 5 per cent due to pilferage. Kathmandu, the Nepalese capital, experiences 35-40 per cent water loss due to leakage through the distribution system.
As was evident at the Chennai workshop, the key hurdle is the lack of consensus on how to mobilise resources and maintain an efficient water supply in growing cities. Politicians and others reflecting entrenched interests often argue that the "poor" (the vast majority in most South Asian cities) cannot afford and are not willing to pay for water. But talk to any slum dweller whether in Delhi, Chennai or Karachi, and it would be instantly evident that the ‘poor’ are already paying: in terms of time, and in desperate circumstances in hard cash to private water vendors. Coimbatore city in southern India has tried to work out a compromise by providing a certain quantum of potable water to the poor free of charge.
Clearly, South Asia needs to break free from the privatisation or no privatisation matrix each time water-related issues are debated. As Junaid Ahmed of the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Programme put it: "There are three dimensions - policy, regulation and delivery. The government needs to have some form of ownership of water utilities. But there has to be a business approach to delivery and there has to be an independent regulator." On that score, South Asian policy makers still have to do learn a lot.
