THE Indira Ghandi Canal is a perfect example of how to spend $500 million badly. Running through the Thar desert in western India, it carries water from the foothills of the Himalayas to the taps and irrigated fields near the border with Pakistan.
Or rather it doesn鈥檛. For most poor people in this the world鈥檚 most densely populated desert, the canal is little more than an inconvenient barrier for their camels. They get their water from traditional ponds, tanks and underground structures that capture the desert鈥檚 occasional rains and stay full long after conventional supplies give out.
A thousand kilometres away, over the border with Pakistan, the citizens of Orangi shanty town in Karachi were for decades promised new sewers by the city authorities. Nothing happened, so they collected subscriptions and organised a sewer system. It works, at a fraction of the cost of the promised services (快猫短视频, 1 June 1996, p 38).
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This week, governments and experts gather in Kyoto, Japan, for one of the largest ever meetings to decide the fate of the planet鈥檚 water supplies. Its key aim is to figure out how to meet the target agreed at last summer鈥檚 World Summit in Johannesburg of getting reliable water supplies and sewerage to more than a billion people who lack them within 12 years. To many, the do-it-yourself approaches of the people of Karachi and the Thar desert seem the obvious way forward. You would imagine that those charged with meeting the new targets would be hot on the trail of such projects.
You would be wrong. Politicians in Kyoto will be digesting the work of a panel of bankers and global water corporations who want to lead them in precisely the opposite direction. The World Panel on Financing Water Infrastructure, chaired by a former head of the International Monetary Fund, Michel Camdessus, will present to ministers an unashamed plea for the privatisation of the world鈥檚 water. Its call for an 鈥渋nversion in the financial architecture鈥� of water infrastructure, from public to private funding, is likely to be rubber-stamped by ministers as the template for 25 years of investment in water across the world.
The trouble is, the forces of global capital that it seeks to unleash can never do the job. International capital just does not dig ponds in deserts and cesspits in shanty towns. And it will soak up funds that could have been spent on such projects.
The panel even admits it. Delve into its report and you find this bald statement: 鈥淥ne cannot expect a significant private role in the rural sector.鈥� Oh dear. More than four out of every five people who lack basic water facilities live in rural areas. Maybe ministers will spot this illogicality when they read the report. But don鈥檛 hold your breath.
The report claims to be about finance, but it is also technologically prescriptive. It says that aid bodies, including the World Bank, 鈥渟hould resume lending to essential surface water storage projects鈥�. This is a green light for the construction of more large dams.
The bank stopped funding large dams in the mid-1990s because they did not deliver and caused huge environmental and social damage. It created a World Commission on Dams that reported in extremely hostile terms just two years ago.
But the wind has changed. The Camdessus report conspicuously ignores the commission and its findings. And the word is that the World Bank is back in the dams business.
The panel seems to be unaware of the small-scale and traditional technologies that keep hundreds of millions of people alive in rural Africa and Asia. It says of Africa: 鈥淎vailable water resources are grossly underused. Only 3 per cent of its renewable water is withdrawn annually鈥n a continent where 40 per cent of the population has inadequate access to water.鈥�
What nonsense. The data it quotes excludes the economic benefits African farmers gain from irrigating their crops and feeding and watering their animals on flood plains without 鈥渨ithdrawing鈥� water at all. And it ignores the hundreds of millions more who capture and use rainwater without it going near a large dam. Because nobody makes a commercial profit out of these technologies, the panel simply can鈥檛 see them.
This blindness matters. Ask the people of arid northern Nigeria left destitute by dams and irrigation schemes that have emptied their rivers. Ask the British economists who calculate that the new, expensively engineered method of sharing out the area鈥檚 scarce water produces smaller economic returns than the old one.
The truth is that big water infrastructure projects of the kind the private sector is good at building and operating 鈥� with their large reservoirs, pipelines, aqueducts and pumping stations 鈥� are largely irrelevant to the needs of the poor. Worse, such projects often end up stealing their water, giving it to cities and commercial farmers.
What the poor need is projects that are cheap, local, small-scale and environmentally friendly. Privatisation will freeze them out.
The World Bank now says that 鈥渨ater must be treated as an economic good鈥�. Well maybe, but it is also a human right. Ministers meeting in Kyoto this weekend need to remember that.