Water under the bridge

On financing there was considerable debate. The expert view from the developed world was that resources would be generated by the user cost and polluter pays principles. These would attract resources from the rich countries. The full range of financing arrangements would include private sector participation. Control for the public interest and that of the poor was considered necessary. Again from South Asia we argued that financing systems for enabling stakeholder institutions did not exist. Financing arrangements which used community collateral, lent through the drought or weather cycles and through project cycles were just not in place and so the so called “international commitments” were only on paper. At this level of detail, the global community reacts with a deafening silence. I argued that at the national level some progress is there in countries like India in its budgets, policy documents and with a commitment by major governance parties to monitor water targets at the regional (state) level. But at the global level at Kyoto there was unwillingness to go beyond general statements of financial support.

This then led to attacks from civil society institutions. In the words of Asahi Shimbun in a conference marked by vague exhortations for further dialogue and cooperation, some of the bluntest comments at the Third Water Forum came from sessions dealing with the controversial topic of privatising water supply and sanitation services. In my mind the issue was not privatisation alone, but that the institutional mechanisms to work out alternative systems in terms of organisational and financing support are not there at all in practice. It was pointed out in a number of interventions that the question is not subsidies, but the fact that the systems to provide institutional support to viable and self supporting projects in the long run don’t exist at all. At this level global dialogues enter into a cul de sac.

It was these kinds of issues which led to the former Dutch Minister and Special envoy of the United Nations at the Conference Jan Pronk telling me that the Conference was serving its purpose if people learnt from each other. Pronk, who used to have extensive dialogues with us in the Planning Commission earlier, felt that the meeting would be a success even if it did not have a concluding declaration. He is right. A Declaration if any has to carry the argument further. A weak declaration is makes little sense as both the World Wild Life Fund and the Geneva based Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council run by India’s Gouri Ghosh argued.

India had a large delegation with a number of Ministers and their officials as also a large number of NGOs participating outside the official delegation. It was the South Africans who took up the cudgels for the poor arguing that for poor people in any country drinking water has to be a right and there could be no compromise on that. Having written the chapter on minimum needs in the Sixth Five Year Plan which provided for a national commitment to provide drinking water to poor people, I could only envy a South African friend who was a visitor at JNU when I was Vice Chancellor there, passionately haranguing me at Kyoto over coffee saying that sophistication is not a substitute for commitment. I could only tell him weakly that in the last few weeks we have made a national commitment and that is to provide free grains to the hungriest part of our population and this is backed by our ruling and the largest opposition party. Back home we can only hope they don’t go back on the commitment for drinking water to the weakest.

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