In a new series for The Samosa, Annabel Symington looks at issues affecting access to water around the world

“The water comes out like a trickle of piss,” says the stooped elderly woman in a purple sari, shaking her little finger for emphasis. She stands next to a solitary water tap in one of Mumbai’s slums. She has to cope with an intermittent water supply from a standpipe that is used by approximately 800 residents a day.

This woman is one of the 62 per cent of Mumbai’s residents who live in a slum. She is also one of 2.6 billion people around the world who lack access to clean water and basic sanitation.

Privatisation is one. Debates over the pros and cons of water privatisation cover a spectrum of views. But the issue of privatisation is perhaps not as black and white as some organisations make it out to be.

In 2007, Mumbai’s residents fought against the World Bank’s plan to privatise their water supply. The privatisation scheme would have led to higher tariffs and little improvement in the distribution of water, said the city’s residents.

The World Bank and the French consultancy firm Castalia were accused of presenting a report advocating privatisation based on inflated data in order to secure profitable private sector contracts. “Castalia's findings supported privatization, but were based on insufficient research, unreliable technology, inaccurate methodology and specious logic,” says Afsar Jafri, a research assistant with Focus on the Global South. The World Bank’s project was rejected.

But the World Bank and its privatisation scheme have not left Mumbai. The World Bank has simply renamed its plan for the city’s water system. It is no longer called privatization. It is now known as ‘multiple contract systems’.

“Through the multiple contract system the World Bank is trying to privatise by outsourcing services in the different water departments to private companies,” said Jafri.

Jafri says the World Bank scheme has “weakened” Mumbai’s water system and made it a third more expensive to run. But the scheme is only a year old and there are currently no figures to back up Jafri’s claims.

Ramakrishna Nallathiga, knowledge manager at the Centre for Good Governance in Hyderabad, argues that outsourcing to private companies is more cost effective in the long run. Ramakrishna is critical of Mumbai’s tariff-based payment system, which allocates different payment rates according to water usage – domestic, commercial or industrial. Ramakrishna says that the very high water tariffs for industrial users are pushing many to relocate out of Mumbai, potentially creating a funds deficit.

However, to focus the debate on either the private or public sector holding the solution to an efficient water system is an over simplification. “The solution is clearly based on a combination,” says Gordon McGranahan, head of the human settlements group at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). Gordon argues that in addition to the private and public sector working together, the inclusion of community-focused initiatives is key to the “sustainability” of any infrastructure development.

SPARC (Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres) is an Indian NGO that works to support housing and infrastructure for India’s urban poor. Sheela Patel, the founder of SPARC, says the reason that debates in Mumbai over private- versus public-controlled water supply appears so polarised, and at some points contradictory, is due to the high percentage of the city’s population living in informal settlements. “It is difficult in a city where almost all wards are 50 per cent slums,” says Patel. “And conjectures assume both extreme possibilities and they get contested without evidence. Thus you will see polarisation.”

Community projects that focus on resident participation are being advocated by many NGOs, such as SPARC, as holding the key to long-term sustainable infrastructure development, whether it be toilets in a Mumbai slum or a water hole in an African village.

Martin Mulenga, senior water and sanitation researcher at IIED, said that the problem with the kind of private sector programmes that the World Bank promotes is that they focus on the science of water access and promote universal solutions to what are in fact local issues with community-specific social problems.

“You have World Bank engineers working with engineers from the private sector, and they solve the problem using a technical approach. But this doesn’t work at the local level.

“The mistake with the private distributors and the World Bank has been in trying to come up with a one-size-fits-all universal solution. You need to look at the local situation and respond accordingly,” adds Mulenga.

Commonly cited as one of the most successful sanitation projects is the locally focused Orangi Pilot Project in Karachi, Pakistan. The project focused on user participation, encouraging the local community to build their own sanitation system.

Each household was given access to the materials needed to build an underground sewer from their home, which they were able to connect with community built collector sewers.

The local authority then stepped in and connected the drains to the main town sewers and treatment plants. Over 100,000 households developed their own sanitation system in Orangi.

“Most examples of successful water and sanitation projects are locally driven and use local resources,” says Mulenga.

But despite the success of community-focused projects, over the last five years, the World Bank has encouraged and supported the signing of 97 private water utility contracts with 28 governments from developing countries. This brings the total number of people reliant on private water companies for their water and sanitation needs to 545 million.

Based on the World Bank’s current policy towards water issues, the Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of people without access to clean water by 2015 will not be reached, according to research by IIED.

The World Bank, which declined to comment, is not pulling out of its quest to privatise the world’s water supply. It is just renaming it.

Annabel Symington is a freelance journalist who has reported from India, Pakistan and Gaza. In May 2009 she won a UNESCO press freedom award for her work on the Gaza conflict.