Commodifying drinking water

By Ahmad Rafay Alam

A few months ago, the Lahore High Court had taken suo motu notice of the quality of water served up by bottled-water companies. I happened to be in court that morning, and overheard the judge say something that has stayed with me since: when he was growing up in Lahore, it was unthinkable that water was something that could be sold. This is true even for my lifetime. I have seen drinking water in my city of Lahore go from being a common resource to a commodity. There is much to make of such a radical change.

It was the colonialist who first tapped Lahore’s underground water resources for the purposes of domestic consumption, that is, drinking and for sanitation. The old water pipe that sucked water from the ground still stands behind the Paani wala Talaab in the Walled City. The management of the water resource lay in the hands of the municipality, which laid out water and sewerage pipes throughout the old city, as well as the rapidly sprawling rest of the city. Water was thus available to those who were served by the municipality and who paid their water dues on time. It was clean, readily available and, importantly, considered “free.”

At the moment, the Water and Sanitation Agency (WASA) of the Lahore Development Authority estimates it manages something in excess of 1,700 kilometres of water and sewage pipes in the city – some new, some nearly a century old, many in-between. But this does not include management of water pipes in the Cantonment, which vests in the Cantonment Board (the Cantonment in Lahore has no sewage system; its residents work with on-site soakage pits), or the management of water by the many phases within the Defence Housing Authority or properties receiving water from the Services and General Administration Department. And here lies an interesting thought.

Most people I ask will readily admit to knowledge of the concepts of the sale or mortgage of land, though few, if any, have ever entered into such transactions themselves. But none will offer any insight into any of the rights to drinking water. It’s odd how there’s a vacuum of knowledge surrounding the rights we have in something as existential as water.

The very many local authorities that are responsible for providing drinking water to the eight million Lahoris are not coordinated in any way. Thus, WASA tends to think it has the rights, under statute, to the city’s underground water resource. But even if it did, it can do nothing about the water extracted, say, by the DHA.

Lack of coordination of how we use our underground water resource wouldn’t be a problem if Lahore’s underground water table were in abundant supply. Since the Indus Basin Treaty apportioned the waters of the River Ravi to India, Lahore has been cut off from its traditional source of groundwater replenishment. There’s no water to replace the water we are currently extracting. You could be allowed to mistakenly think that rainwater is a source of recharging the water table. It would be, if only we weren’t so adamant in paving over green areas and emitting all manner of liquid pollution into the soil as well.

The tube-wells installed in the city are now extracting drinking water from a depth of some 700 feet and more. Water immediately under the soil is too polluted to drink.

One of the problems of going so far down to get drinking water is that it requires enormous amounts of electricity. Last year, in a remarkable example of ignoring the potential of solar electricity, the Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif ordered that the city’s tube-wells be fitted with diesel generators so that residents would still get water during prolonged periods of load-shedding. Not only will the cost of diesel soon become part of our water charges but, because of the use of diesel generators, our use of water is now completely environmentally unsustainable.

Lahoris must not take for granted whatever water they have available to them now. In almost all of Pakistan’s major urban areas, drinking water is either unavailable, is unhygienic or just not there. In these alarming circumstances, it is completely understandable how private interests can take up where the local authorities are simply not up to the task. Witness the commodification of water.

In the last 15 years, as drinking water problems have exacerbated as much as they have been ignored, private companies have overseen a subtle propaganda campaign which, in essence, has been nothing less than a reversal of priorities. Instead of citizens demanding more from their local authorities when it comes to clean water, they have sat back and allowed drinking water to be allocated a commercial value and be considered in economic terms. Their jobs were made considerably easier by the attitude of the urban elite, who think nothing of spending Rs15 for a glass or two of water when the vast majority of urban Pakistanis cannot afford such an expense, on a daily basis. In a city where only 20 years ago water was a common resource, it is now commonplace to see drinking water for sale.

I have it on good authority that the only water available at the recent workshop in Islamabad on drinking water organised by the ministry of the environment – which, it seems, is devoid of a sense of irony – was bottled water.

Meanwhile, the water and sanitation infrastructure in Lahore is in disrepair. The persistent rate of gastroenteritis in the city is testament to the fact that, on too many occasions, rusted pipes discharge sewage into pipes carrying drinking water. The health and environmental impacts of this do not require elaboration. The great challenge facing WASA is not, however, mending the pipes. Because of the rapid urbanisation expected in the future, WASA will need to lay as many kilometres of pipes in the next 20 years as it has since Partition. For anyone who appreciates the magnitude of this challenge, drinking water in Lahore is now something that cannot be ignored any longer.

On war footing we must repair the existing water and sewerage infrastructure. On war footing we must plan for future urbanisation. On war footing we must put in place drastic water-use legislation and water-conservation measures. And we must ensure our efforts yield positive results. The goal should not just be the availability of clean drinking water, but its availability as a right. We cannot allow the commodification of water. It is against our ethos.

The writer is an advocate of the high court and a member of the adjunct faculty at LUMS. He has an interest in urban planning.