Ashok Khosla

Access to clean water is a fundamental human right

More and more persons, each wanting more and more things is hardly a sustainable proposition in the face of a finite resource base. Human ingenuity and technology can only buy us a little time – they cannot solve the underlying, fundamental problem. Only slowing the growth of demand for the services our environment provides can do that.

Over the past thirty years, the limits set by nature have become increasingly apparent to some of us, though admittedly not to many. The main reason is, of course, that for most people – as for most ostriches — it is easier to ignore the impending danger than to make the inconvenient changes needed to deal with it. For them, such limits exist only after they have already been transgressed. The trouble with that is, given the exponential mathematics of natural processes and the long lag times between cause and effect, it is already too late when the proof becomes available.

But how much proof do we need? Fossil fuels may well appear to be plentiful today, but it will not take many decades for them to become quite scarce, particularly if everyone starts using them as cavalierly as in the industrialized countries today. Why else would well-informed nations go to war with others to protect the supplies of such resources?

The threats to other life support systems – the stratospheric ozone shield, global climate, biodiversity – have already reached stages where these issues have, within a decade of being recognized, raced their way up to the top of the international agenda.

Of all the resources and natural processes, there is none more vital than water. Indeed, what human need could be more basic than the need for water? Next to Oxygen, it is surely one of the substances most critical for human survival. Water is also the basic requirement for agriculture, industry, and many other economic activities. Water is the lifeline of most human activities: agriculture, industry, commerce — not to mention domestic ones such as cooking, washing and personal hygiene. Nearly 70% of all living tissue and more than 50% of all raw materials in industrial production consist of water. Lack of clean water on the other hand is, in one way or the other the single most important cause of human discomfort, disease and early death.

Not only civilisation but life itself and water go hand-in-hand together

And which natural resource is more abundant in the sub-continent than fresh water? The monsoons and the snows that melt in the Himalayas bring more water through the rivers of India than perhaps any other comparable area of the world, with the possible exception of the Amazon basin. These rivers and the fertile lands they irrigate have for thousands of years supported some of the most densely populated regions of our planet and provided the foundations of some of the highest civilizations ever known.

Yet, there is growing talk in our country today of impending "Water Wars". The hydrologic cycles of our country have been so disturbed and destroyed that in many parts drought and pervasive, unquenched thirst have become a way of life. Neighbouring states have already drawn daggers over sharing of river waters and taken their fights not only to the courts of law, but also to the streets. Each year, growing numbers of villagers in drought stricken districts squabble endlessly over access to dwindling water sources. And farmers in different parts of the country find their crops dwindling as their groundwater recedes from aquifer to deeper aquifer.

Indeed, we do not have to wait any longer for the war over water to take place. In a very real way it has already broken out – in the form of the desperate skirmishes, frantic fights and bitter battles that hundreds of millions of our compatriots daily go through to get their bucket of water. Sometimes these battles are with each other, sometimes with nature. And the outcome is not reassuring. For many in our biggest cities – Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai to mention a few — the municipalities can supply no more than a few hours of water a day. Sometimes not even every day. The prime daily task of the women and girls of our villages is now to walk three, four and sometimes five hours a day to fetch small quantities of water for their families. In towns and cities, they don’t have to walk: they wait in long lines instead, but the human costs are similar. Not to mention the economic costs of so many people engaged in unproductive work, work that should be unnecessary in the first place – leading to an opportunity cost in terms of loss of income estimated at more than Rs 1,000 crores per year.

The battles are not only being fought every day, but they are being lost, on a grand scale.

And many of them are invisible. Take the impact of lack of water on the health of our people. Sickness, debility not only take their toll on the individual, but result in massive absenteeism, the cost of which to the national economy is incalculable. The cost of water-borne gastro-enteric diseases in terms of the nourishment lost in feeding the zoo that a large part of our population carries within their stomachs has been estimated to be some 15% of the entire food production of the country.

The reason water has been taken so much for granted, and never explicitly treated as a resource is that for most of history, and in most parts of the inhabited world, it was freely and plentifully available. But, all of a sudden, it no longer is. Population growth and economic activity has, within the space of a few decades, taken it from worldwide abundance to local scarcity.

The primary reason for this is that, by tradition, water has been an "open access" resource. It has been available, on a first come first served basis, freely and free. This meant that it was used, and misused, without concern for its intrinsic cost or for its contribution to value addition. Or for the impact on its long term availability. And, of course, as it becomes increasingly scarce, it goes mainly to those who have the political power or economic capital to appropriate it by controlling the sources.

Recent studies have shown that water, more perhaps than any other resource, is grossly under priced. Many users in agriculture, industry and homes get it at a price that is one-hundredth that of the cost of delivering it. And one-thousandth that of the value it adds to the products or services it makes possible.

No wonder our agriculture and industry depend on technologies that waste this precious resource with so much profligacy. And result in such rapidly accelerating scarcity.

Water, like other scarce resources, needs to be priced. Neither too high, nor too low – but judiciously graded to make it accessible to all segments of society. It also needs to be placed within the local control of communities that can decide on its distribution among the different uses and users who need it.

Only thus will it be conserved and sustained — and also be available to everyone, rich and poor, equitably and fairly.

The second, perhaps not so obvious, example is the vicious cycle of affluence and influence. Those who can afford to do so, buy high quality water for all their needs, and ensure that they are adequately insulated from the impacts of the general scarcity of the resource. This is not a minor phenomenon: the money spent in India today on bottled drinking water (Rs 1,500 Crores in 2002, growing at a phenomenal 80% per year) will soon exceed the total funds spent by public agencies on drinking water supply. The rich no longer have a major stake in the quality and performance of the public service and little incentive to use their influence to change policies or investment priorities. The cycle of affluence and influence leads directly to privatisation of services to the rich and marginalisation of the services accessed by the poor. However short-sighted this might be even from a self-interest point of view, those who are affluent and influential rarely realise this until it is too late.

Neither type of vicious cycle can be good — for anyone, rich or poor.

On the other hand, if the money spent on bottled water were to go to improving municipal supplies, both the rich and the poor would benefit.

The natural response of most governments and businesses, driven as they are largely by the single-minded fraternities of engineers and economists, whose primary aim is to internalise all benefits and externalise the costs, is to go for big, mega projects. Large scale engineering works are attractive for many reasons, not least for the political capital they yield, in addition to the financial leakages they are amenable to. But the experience of the Soviet Union with the Aral Sea, not to mention the big dams of almost any country show that, overall, such projects are not always successful. The lessons are being slowly learned – it is difficult to imagine the World Bank or the US Corps of Engineers building many more such structures in the future – but it is quite difficult to change the macho engineering mindset.

This is not to say that no engineering project should ever be undertaken. Only that it must be pursued only after full cost accounting shows that the overall benefits will, over time, exceed the overall costs. The projected benefits must not be exaggerated, as they usually have been in the past, and all the costs must be enumerated, including the submergence of productive lands, life spans based on realistic siltation rates, displacement and rehabilitation of people, ecological destruction, energy requirements, political issues, gestation periods and frictional losses such as delays, patronage and corruption.

And all these calculations must be carried out in the face of other viable alternatives, including demand side management that takes account of changes in production systems, consumption patterns and other factors that could, in combination, reduce the demand for water in the first place.

To achieve a viable balance between supply and demand for water is not an easy task. The issues are complex and causes often get mixed up with effects. Moreover, supply and demand are sometimes not independent of each other: Interventions that increase supply can also increase demand, often resulting at best in little net improvement and at worst in a counterproductive boomerang effect. Most present policies and actions unfortunately have a tendency to deal with symptoms rather than cures, getting short term gains at the expense of long term societal goals.

Ultimately, a large part of the solution boils down to redesigning the system of governance. How can a local resource management issue like water be effectively dealt with by decision makers who are too remote to be in touch with realities on the ground? Management of water must ultimately reside with local communities, working within the guidelines provided by planning authorities to be mindful of regional resource constraints. This requires much higher levels of participation, information, transparency and dialogue among the different levels of government than exist today.

At the national level, there is also need for greater harmony and coherence among the policies of different ministries to avoid conflicts promoted by these policies in the use of water for sectors such as agriculture, industry, commerce, mining, municipal and other uses.