The Delusion has lasted too long . . .

You’d easily remember the day when electricity broke down on a night. Came the morning and you were still without power...

... You turned the tap on. It didn’t work. The shave, the bath, and a quick breakfast that you wolfed down as you reached for the car keys. It was a bad day’s start.
It is so easy to take these two resources for granted. And you simply don’t have water in our urban sprawls if you don’t have energy. The equation cuts both ways. No power, no water; no water, well, there’ll be no power you can generate in states like Karnataka which are so heavily dependent on its rivers and dams.
Coming as this nation does from that Nehruvian era that gave us the legacy of shortages and the crumbs of sanctions that the government sector threw at its people, and still continues to do in the smaller semi-urban parts of the country, life still revolves around the babu who is all–powerful.
For instance, supply of water. What the Government has not told you so long is that water is a huge, potentially rich business. They have covered their gargantuan efficiencies, with a system that is awfully inefficient, and a staff who just couldn’t care what you got, as long as they lined their pockets, or managed to cling to their ‘service’. It has learnt to prey on its users with the specter of shortages that has twisted the language of the bureaucracy to offer arguments on the need for more development funds, for creating more of the same things, that will lead to even more shortages in a cyclical spiral that leads nowhere.
And down the line at the last mile levels where the face of the government touches the hapless citizen, the greater the shortage, the higher the opportunity to make money on the sly. Or so the babus of administration have figured.
On a morning trek last week through the chawls of a slum settlement in Dehradun’s Shastri Nagar, we found dozens of families on the street on a workday at 0700 am. Waiting for that public standpipe to gurgle. There was just the hiss of air locked for hours in the pipes. The line lengthened, and grew impatient. But many of them were stoic. They just had to live with it.
They had paid, some of them, as much as thrice the regulatory tariff for a new connection. The connection was installed, alright. But the water did not reach the new tap.
The settlement was at the tail end of the distribution system. And up the supply gridlines, with water being used by over two thousand homes in the vicinity, there was just not enough water, or pressure in these ageing pipelines, to reach these homes.
Most water lines in Indian cities and towns go back to the days of the Raj. Mumbai and Bangalore, Chennai and Kolkata, and a host of smaller towns that were the bastion of the British army, still sport lines buried in a tangled welter of metal that go back to the 1920s.
And since the Fifties, more downstream pipes have been screwed onto those existing lines, only making more acute the problem of metal fatigue.
Add to this, other woes of pipes being clogged with deposits gained over the years with the high calcium content in water. So the pressure drops further. Amd more homes turn taps to get that familiar hiss of air.
Managing water is like managing just about any other business. You need to operate and maintain; upgrade lines once every decent while. You need to service the customer, or the water user’s need just like you’ll do any client who pays for a product or service. And you need to put a human face to the entire business.
We have been deluded by a devious information mechanism that has told us, for years on end, that social welfare is a priority; that these water corporations deliver water at an enormous subsidy—all in the interest of our people.
Our sympathies are won by the ingenuous spiel on how our politicians don’t want to touch the price line, and so water corporations have to continue to bleed themselves with losses. And they have clung to these tailored impressions that they give out, in the hope, of course, that the water user will never get wise to the massive internal haemorrhage that every water utility suffers endlessly, with sops from governments that keep them alive.
The story, as we see it, is very different. The system can be made efficient. All it takes in any mid-size residential block of, say, 2000 homes, is a revamp of existing lines at costs as little as Rs 3500 to 4000 per household. And if it is a household that cannot afford to pay it in one go, it can be paid at a piffling Rs 100 a month over three years.
There are banks—from the World Bank to the ADB, to your own friendly neighbourhood bank—that are willing to extend the financial assistance, as long as they know that the money will be paid with a tariff mechanism that will service the debt, at interest costs that are very viable.
We will see this change coming over the urban landscape over the next couple of years. PHE departments will be a thing of the past, if the enabling of communities on the management of such water networks is complete. The rumblings in many urban pockets among irate residents clearly portend that future to come when managing these resources will rest in the hands of the users themselves.