A Story of Brussels Sprouts

In his book, The Ideas That Con-quered the World, Michael Mandelbaum tells a story about a young girl who is eating dinner at a friend’s house and her friend’s mother asks her if she likes brussels sprouts. “Yes, of course,” the girl says. “I like brussels sprouts.” After dinner, though, the mother notices that the girl hasn’t eaten a single sprout. “I thought you liked brussels sprouts,” the mother said. “I do,” answered the girl, “but not enough to actually eat them.”
An Indian friend of mine in Hong Kong recently related that story to me during a conversation about the serious threat every Indian city faces of no power, or no water. Readers of this journal know that I don’t tire of urging people to ‘think supplyside’ on resources. We can’t keep saying, ‘use less of this or that’. Well, we don’t want to be profligate as sensible people, but that’s beside it. It should not be because we can’t put our minds to organize those resources. The reason I don’t write about policy much or entangle with the government, particularly relating to water, is because the solution is so ridiculously obvious there isn’t much to say. Here’s what I mean:
The ADB has been seriously considering the idea of getting towns and cities in India getting used to the idea of getting water round the clock. If we can have mobiles and telephones on tap through all hours, and we use them only when we want to, why can’t it be so with water, is the pitch. And why not? Coming from where these bankers do, with so many of the east Asian cities, and those hugely growing ones in China, having got past the basic stumbling blocks of power and water being an impediment at the level of daily living, it seems only natural for them to think that this should not be a task daunting. Look at nearly every large town in Asia—Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Hong Kong, even many sectors of Bangkok city, and more recently Kathmandu—they are all getting there with round-the-clock water supply, and with household connections that are close to 100 per cent.
So what helped those cities get there, nd only in the last 8–10 years? In most cases, it was not more funds and so more infrastructure. It was rigorous planning, better use of existing resources, and management of people, better decision-making, and running water corporations like they were businesses.
But when it comes to our cities, the story of the girl comes to mind. At the apex level the government sure agrees that we want better access to water, but we don’t want it badly enough.
For banks like the ADB or its Big Brother the World Bank, they have another think coming, if they believe that merely initiating the thought of water and 24 x 7, will trigger action from city water managers across India, as a two–day workshop in Bangalore held by the ADB persistently pointed out. The participants were senior bureaucrats from a half-dozen states across the country. What was conspicuous by its absence was the presence of politicians, or elected members of the polity in each state. That can make a difference—you’ll see why as you read further on.
While making energy available on a regular all–hours count is bogged down by a set of challenges that lead up to greater threat to natural resources—dams and hydel projects that lay waste forests, and so on—, it is reasonably easier to get water flow all hours, if only we got our water departments to sew up their act.
In many towns, it is not lack of water at the source that is a hassle. At the root is reluctance. Even planners are averse to the idea, for they carry this serious fear that water use will rise sharply if the supply was round the clock. We need to ‘control’ its availability, keep it on check, lest the source pose a problem, say the babus presiding over urban water. May be true in some towns, but is that always the reality?
If a Chief Minister, or the major political party in a place said to the officers: “You will plug all those leakages on every network of pipelines, pay up the arrears to the power corporation for the electricity you draw for running your pumps, and start collecting your bills at a decent price from the bulk buyers—business, hotels, industry,” well, you’ll see every city getting water flowing on line.
Trust me, that is the kind of diktat that would get the bureaucracy’s attention. Short of that, any argument for continuous water supply will, well, hold no water.
So why don’t the politicians say these things? “Like that girl with the brussels sprouts,” said my friend who told me the story, “the politicians and the bureaucrats are all for providing water on an all–hours scale—but just not enough actually to do something about it.”
At the end of the day, the politicians would rather live with the mess that there is now, than risk a collapsed administration system that will take away their power and pelf; and the bureaucrats would rather live with a crisis-ridden, by-the-day management that their people down the line can make all kinds of money off of—rather than risk losing their sleep over efficiencies that nobody appreciates. The politicians and the bureaucrats each assume that in the end, the other political parties and some bureaucrats up or down the management chain, will talk the people out of the need for it anyway, so why worry.
Are they all behaving cynically? Of course, these are the very groups constantly exhorting us all about “development”, to a point where even a well-meaning Prime Minister calls for a “Mumbai that will do a Shanghai”.
The prevailing assumption in the bureaucracy is that if something really big is going wrong—it must be because we don’t have the funds. Or perhaps it is a subterfuge, for saying, ‘Well, we don’t want to be caught in the crossfires of these political shenanigans.’ Yes, urban water policy, if there was one at all in any town, has been pretty dysfunctional, but the real problem is that those parties with the leverage to make a difference refuse to see it that way. They are, after all, busy handling more weighty matters. We’re talking political dominoes.
So there you have it—my tuppence worth on the matter. Unless the bigwigs in politics and a gang of gung-ho administration officers get serious about the problem, it’s not going to get fixed. And for now, neither one seems to be ready or willing to eat their brussels sprouts.
—The Ed.