We need an enabling environment to ensure that every citizen’s basic right to water is not violated

Guest Post: Sunita Nadhamuni

Article Courtesy: Businessworld

Any discussion on private sector participation in water must be preceded by answering a fundamental question. What is the primary motivation of the service provider (this could be the local/state government, the utility, the NGO, etc.) in setting up the water supply system? To ensure high quality service delivery through an efficient, financially sustainable system, or to ensure that every last citizen today and in the foreseeable future has access to water for her basic needs?

Image Courtesy: Businessworld

The first answer starts by seeing water as a commodity, an economic good that must be well-developed and efficiently managed to result in high quality of service to consumers.

The second one sees water as a fundamental right for every human being, whose management must begin with ensuring reliable access for the poorest and marginalised first.

Arguably, the public deserves both — high quality and efficient service delivery and basic needs ensured for all. But the primary motivation of the service provider has led to different paradigms of water system management.

Urban service provisioning has tended to operate in the first paradigm. Here, there has been an increasing push to bring in the private sector, the rationale being the pressing urgency and scale of the problem, and the efficiency, professionalism and money that the private sector will bring in to solve it. Concerns articulated around their participation relate to governance and transparency — the structuring of the contracts, decision-making processes, reforms, tariff setting, etc. Their capability to universalise water access, which is a fundamental obligation of the state, while safeguarding the environment is yet to be met satisfactorily.

An independent and strong regulator that is sensitive to the needs of the people is essential to oversee and control private sector participation that is still nascent in the water sector today.

On the other hand, scores of grassroot-level NGOs, mostly in rural areas, have successfully shown how basic needs of all can be met in a sustainable manner. Common to all of them is the primacy given to building an enabling environment first. The first feature of such an enabling environment is a strong, aware and mobilised community that is represented by all its diverse groups, and has a role in the decision-making for its town or village. The second is a strong local government with sufficient capacities to study, analyse, plan and manage its water systems with high degree of transparency and accountability.

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