Abstract
Water governance has been at the centre of societal formations. From ‘hydraulic societies’ headed by ‘oriental despots’ to community-based models of water governance all point to the centrality of this naturally available resource defining state-society-citizen relations. Accessing water under the modern welfare state came to be seen as a ‘material’ emblem of citizenship. Later, neoliberalism paved the way for commercialisation and privatisation riding high on the slogan of ‘universal access’ and discourse of ‘scarcity’. These paradigmatic shifts signalled changes in water governance. This article charts a broad-brush history of changes in the governance structure and logic of water supply over the last seven decades in Delhi. It focuses on a specific aspect of water governance, that is, mechanisms to supply drinking water in post-colonial Delhi. The case of the capital city of a developing country has been used as a prism to comment on the trajectory of water governance in post-colonial societies.
Introduction
This ‘magic’, whereby water sustains or snuffs life, is at the centre of all human attempts to control or govern it. Water governance has been pivotal to societal formations with the earliest histories of human settlement and production attesting to this centrality. Socio-economic-cultural landscapes have been defined in relation to water and are subject to perpetual readjustments.
1
Water governance has led to moves towards cooperation as well as conflicts. Several formal/informal institutions of cooperation as well as instances of conflict between individuals, communities and nation-states are a result of attempts to control water. Enmetena Cone in the Louvre Museum bears epigraphical testimony to one of the earliest recorded history of water war in Mesopotamia. It records the conflict between Lagash and Umma in 2500
While water governance is a central feature of human civilisational history, it gives a miss to ‘neat all-encompassing conceptual’ delineations. This difficulty is partly due to the ‘complex materiality’ of water as a resource and flowing out of this materiality is the issue of entanglement of scales of governance. Water is ‘fugitive’—it does not respect administrative boundaries yet is non-substitutable. Water is a resource found in the natural environment but its use is essential to all social and economic activity; its natural occurrence is highly variable and distribution is unequal. This materiality renders it difficult to fit ‘neat conceptual’ paradigms of governance. 3 With this disclaimer in place my chapter seeks to deliberate on shifting paradigms of water governance.
The chapter essentially focuses on a specific aspect of water governance, that is, mechanisms to supply drinking water in post-colonial Delhi. The case of the capital city of a developing country has been used as a prism to comment on the trajectory of water governance in post-colonial societies. Hydraulic Citizenship emerged as an important source of legitimacy of the welfare state model. Universal coverage, service obligation and cross-subsidisation of water supply became one of the indicators of welfare orientation in much of Western Europe. In post-colonial societies pressures of population and lack of resources constituted the matrix of hydraulic citizenship. The arrival of the piped water signified inclusion within the city, as a valid ‘citizen’. The piped network expansion in Delhi, however, has been in spurts with different triggering factors and players at the helm of affairs. In sections below an account of these factors and players will be presented. Hence, this is an attempt to provide a broad-brush history of changes in the governance structure and logic of water supply over the last seven decades in Delhi.
In the first section, we will try to provide a global ideational context in which governance transformations are being made. The second section will focus on the changing nature of the drinking water supply in Delhi as a reflection of this global ideological context.
Setting the Stage
The 1990s were a significant decade for global action on water. On the one hand, Mahbub-ul Haq’s call for attention to Human Security included access to clean water as an important indicator of ‘freedom from want’. 4 Water is inextricably linked to the development discourse. Simultaneously, Garrett Hardin’s 1968 ‘tragedy of commons’ thesis gained significant traction providing ideological support for the commodification of water and bringing about governance reforms in the sector. 5 Now, water was seen as a resource to be managed effectively by the market. The essential argument is that anything free was bound to be wasted, and putting a price would result in conservation. The welfare model of the state-owned-managed water supply would make way for the involvement of water corporations in ‘efficient’ supply.
The International Conference on Water and the Environment held in Dublin in 1992 was a landmark event which raised the issue of sustainable use of water. There were over 500 participants including government-designated experts, members from international, intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations. The conference opened with a water ceremony where children made a fervent appeal to preserve precious water resources for future generations. The conference participants called for ‘fundamental new approaches to the assessment, development and management of freshwater resources’ with ‘political commitment and involvement from the highest levels of government to the smallest communities’. Immediate action was needed to deal with ‘overconsumption and pollution of water’ as well as ‘rising threats from drought and floods’. The Indian contingent of four young administrative officers agreed with four guiding principles listed in the Dublin statement. Fresh water was identified as a ‘finite and vulnerable resource’, to be developed and managed with the participation of users, planners and policymakers. Women’s central role in the ‘provision, management and safeguarding of water’ was recognised. It was the fourth guiding principle which brought about a paradigmatic shift in ways of thinking about water and its supply. It read as follows: ‘Water has an economic value in all its competing uses and should be recognized as an economic good.’ 6
In June that year world leaders congregated at Rio de Janeiro for what came to be popularly called Earth Summit. The Dublin statement was to be commended at this UN Summit of Heads of State. The Indian contingent was led by the then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao who by now had officially declared the opening up of Indian Economy. Chief of the Native Americans Oren N. Lyons made a powerful speech making the case for sustainability. It began with ‘(t)he elders told us almost 500 years ago that there is going to come a time when you will not be able to drink the water….’ While world leaders reiterated the need for ecologically sustainable development policies, hordes of protestors camped outside. Greenpeace’s banner on Sugar Loaf Mountain declaring ‘SOLD OUT’ captured the essence of protests and the paradigmatic shift. 7
UN Commission on Sustainable Development Conference in Paris, 1998 noted ‘private sector as one of the growing sources of investment in the water sector’. 8 One of the recommendations for governments was to provide an enabling environment for public-private partnerships at the local and national levels. Market and its competition were seen as a panacea for ensuring sustainable development and the preservation of the environment including freshwater.
The next event most significant for the agenda of corporate control and commodification of water was the World Water Forum 2000 held at Hague. It was convened jointly by the World Bank; big business lobby organisations like Global Water Partnership; leading water corporations like Vivendi, Suez; food processing businesses, Nestle and Unilever manufacturing bottled water. There were about 5,700 members in attendance. The most important debate settled on the floor of this convention was the declaration of water as a human ‘need’ instead of a ‘right’. This designation of water as a basic need got ratified by a statement issued by the UN Ministerial Conference attached to this event. 9 The Doha round of WTO negotiations in the year 2001 committed countries to negotiations on trade in services. The process that began with the Uruguay round in 1995 had to actually take off from Doha. Environmental services to be opened up for trade extended to water supply. 10 Hence, there were a series of international congregations stressing the point of private participation, reduction of subsidies in short complete reform of the water sector particularly in the developing world. The public water supply systems of the welfare model came to be seen as ‘elite archipelagos’ unresponsive to the needs of the poor. The slogan of ‘universal access’ and discourse of ‘scarcity’ paved the way for commercialisation and privatisation. The First UN World Water Report 2003 identified 31 countries facing severe water stress and scarcity. It reported, over one billion people had no access to clean drinking water. 11 Access to safe drinking water became an important evaluative target for assessing the fulfilment of millennium development goals. The target was to reduce the number of people without access to safe drinking water by half by the year 2015. 12
It is no surprise that in this decade the global water market registered phenomenal growth. ‘The dollars at stake are huge’, wrote Shawn Tully for
City after city fell into the kitty of these water companies: London, Johannesburg, Jakarta, Manila, Cochabamba, Casablanca, Santiago de Chile, Atlanta and Berlin, just to name a few. It appeared as though transnational corporations had reinvented the guiding principles of governance. The social welfare state and the national security state, the dominant models of governance in the post-war world, were giving way to the ‘corporate security state’. The state was providing a secure environment for profitable investment in water.
This unprecedented focus on drinking water supply and its management in the last three decades has raised an important governance issue—that of the ‘best’ agency for ensuring efficient delivery and greater access. The question becomes pertinent in the case of countries like India which have significantly low coverage of piped water supply. In much of the third world, this access deficiency is sought to be mitigated by replacing developmental state with private agencies in water supply. There is a marked shift in discourse: Emphasis on rights of the developmental state is replaced by an emphasis on the market. The shift is evident in the water policies framed by successive governments since the late 1980s.
Since independence, the Indian government’s response to water needs has been that of undertaking multipurpose mega-projects like big dams. The emphasis was on irrigation, hydroelectric power, flood control, etc. The allocations to urban drinking water never crossed 2% of the plan funds. Drinking water was identified as a distinct priority only as late as 1987. But the same policy also introduced the concept of putting a price on water: ‘water rates should be such as to foster motivation for economy in use, and should cover maintenance and operational charges and a part of the fixed costs.’ 14 This water policy was subsequently amended in 2002, which further underscored the government’s commitment to privatise water by declaring it as an asset rather than a right.
Water Works in Delhi
The introduction of piped water supply in Delhi was marked by the imperial need to arrest troop mortality. Miasmatic theories on diseases prevalent in England had identified contaminated water as primarily responsible for epidemics like cholera. The technology of extracting water from the river bed through trench wells and supplying it over long distances securely in pipes also became a means to stamp imperial authority. Colonies served as a fertile ground for testing solutions and the career advancement of engineers and experts. All these factors resulted in the sanitary commissioner’s 1869, proposal for supplying piped water in Delhi. This proposal became operational 20 years later after a series of failed experiments, accounting manoeuvres and attendant downscaling of the project. Over the next five decades, the expansion of colonial water works was limited by considerations of race and revenue. Hence, the capital city of independent India inherited a patchy piped network, debates on contamination of a 40-year-old supply system and a water administration pulled in different directions by its constituents.
While governance structures, ensuing debates and concerns about water supply got carried forward, the logic of water supply underwent changes in post-independence India. The developmental state declared protected (piped) water supply ‘a fundamental birth-right of every citizen’. 15 Accessing water under the modern welfare state became a ‘material’ emblem of citizenship, and priority areas were identified accordingly. 16 However, the challenge of numbers in proportion to financial resources at hand remained and got exacerbated by the influx of half a million partition survivors in Delhi alone. City limits were stretched and so was its piped network with rehabilitation efforts determining the pressure points for extension. While differential access in colonial Delhi was racially determined in the immediate aftermath of partition civic amenities including water supply was organised according to the paying capacity of residents. ‘Cheap colonies’ were provided amenities of ‘austere standards’ like common neighbourhood taps. Even before piped water of ‘austere’ standards could reach all refugee colonies, concerns of contamination and cholera were being raised. Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation the propellent offering additional resources for network extension itself was wrapped up by the year 1965.
The reorganisation of states in 1956 brought about a significant change in the structure of water governance. With the abolition of Part C States, Delhi was placed under direct administration of the Union Government. The Joint Water Board constituted in 1926 had entities representing inherent spatial hierarchies of the city as members. These hierarchies played out in allocation of water to respective areas. The new governance arrangement post the implementation of State Reorganisation Committee recommendations saw Delhi Municipal Corporation being entrusted with water supply. The Joint Water and Sewage Board was replaced by the Delhi Water Supply and Sewage Disposal Committee of the Delhi Municipal Corporation. The responsibility for execution was further delegated to Delhi Water Supply and Sewage Disposal Undertaking (DWSSDU).
The committee with its mix of elected and nominated members was seen to be better equipped to ensure better services. The elected members were Municipal Councillors and aldermen, whereas nominated members were technical experts chosen by the Central Government for their competence in industrial, administrative, financial or even labour matters. While there was a significant change in the administrative structure, rules of governance remained unaltered. Several regulatory provisions of the colonial era were carried into the text of water law.
The National Water Supply and Sanitation Programme (NWSSP) of the first Five Year Plan saw only one urban and one rural water network expansion proposal submitted by DMC being approved. The Indo-US Operational Agreement (No 25) provided assistance in materials, equipment and personnel to the NWSSP. The network expansion and improvement schemes were taken up by DMC over the next two decades. The wear and tear of colonial waterworks exhausted most of the funds to the peril of network expansion efforts.
The Master Plan of Delhi and Delhi Development Authority expanded the urban sprawl to unprecedented proportions. Providing water to these newly urbanised areas emerged as a fresh challenge. The rural distress in general led to migrants flooding metropolises and mushrooming of slums. Slum demolitions during the National Emergency were followed by resettlement and rehabilitation. Cleansing the city resulted in extension of its frontiers to areas which were hitherto uninhabited without any civic amenities. In this backdrop, we see the rise of a new urban politics pivoted on developmental state’s welfare schemes. 17 Patronage politics saw some expansion of the piped network; however, it relied mostly on providing immediately realisable ad hoc solutions like supplying through tankers. Keeping the water tariff low became a test for democratic credentials of the government while ledgers of DWSSDU displayed mounting deficits.
The National Capital Territory Act 1991 met the longstanding statehood demand midway. Delhi got its own legislative assembly. This act divested Delhi Municipal Corporation of Water Supply duties. A new Water Board named Delhi Jal Board (DJB) came up as a technocratic entity with elected representatives from the assembly and the municipal corporation. This body tried to rectify the problem of delays due to the multiplicity of agencies with entangled jurisdictions by providing representation.
The most important aspect of this institutional change, however, was the neoliberal turn taken by the water board at its very inception. The provisions of the DJB Act itself cleared the way for private participation, borrowing from foreign banks, focus on recovery of costs, stringent provisions for dealing with defaulters, etc. Soon after DJB applied for a loan to the World Bank for a consultancy report on reforms in the water sector. This was in perfect tune with developments in the water sector the world over.
Neoliberal Water
The DJB from its inception was oriented towards reforming the water sector.
A water treatment plant was proposed in 1998 at Sonia Vihar. By 2002, a design–build–operate work contract for this water treatment plant was awarded to Suez-Degremont, a French multinational corporation specialising in drinking water and sewage services. The allegations were that DJB had negotiated an ‘indefensible’ contract designed to ensure the company always met its targets.
By November 2004, a new tariff structure with two distinct components of ‘fixed access charges’ and ‘volumetric charges’ was introduced. This signalled a shift in policies of price fixation, aimed at cost recovery. 18 The associated hike in water tariff was criticised by the opposition but appreciated by the media and many civil society groups.
Around the same time, DJB secured a 2.5 million dollar loan from the World Bank. This loan was for project preparation of the ‘much needed’ institutional, financial, fiscal and service reforms. The consultancy was awarded to Pricewaterhouse Coopers, not without allegations of the World Bank arm-twisting DJB into granting the award to a chosen bidder. The bank countered the allegations by declaring the tendering process as an ‘excellent example of the Bank’s close monitoring of the procurement process to ensure transparency and fair competition’. 19 In 2004, PWC submitted its final report running into five volumes which identified the ailments of the water supply and sewerage system of Delhi. 20 The report was promptly accepted by the DJB and adapted into the ‘Delhi Water Supply and Sewerage Reforms Project’. This proposed project invited a spirited resistance from Delhi’s civil society and DJB employee unions.
High non-revenue or unbilled water—approximately 49% of total production—became a major point of contention. Leakages from pipeline were calculated at approximately 40% but more importantly water dispensed by 11,533 standposts and 493 water tankers was listed as non-revenue water. Leakage calculations and reduction targets were debunked by the resistance movement. In fact, the project report itself noted that on actual measurement at select pipelines, the real losses from the distribution systems and customer connections were only 24%. The supply shortage and need for augmenting it was felt acutely. Intermittent and low-pressure supply was linked to health risks of consumers and financial performance of the water utility. A Water Supply Master Plan towards ‘vertical unbundling of DJB’ for greater efficiency through private sector involvement was proposed. The consultants strongly recommended that DJB aim for a continuous (24/7) water supply. 21 This was in perfect tune with recommendations of another ongoing study—Delhi 24/7 Water Supply Project—sponsored by the Government of NCT and Ministry of Environment with Japanese funding through the World Bank. It categorically stated that ‘since there is no experience in India in providing 24/7 water supply’ …‘foreign private players’ had to be engaged. These proposals unambiguously aimed at massive reforms in DJB, hence, the project popularly came to be called the DJB privatisation project.
Unlike tariff-hike, these proposals came to be seen as direct attempts at privatising water supply in Delhi. A spirited resistance was offered by an alliance of civil society groups including RWAs and trade unions particularly those associated with employees of DJB and opposition parties. Narratives of transnational water cartels playing havoc with people’s lives in Bolivia, the Philippines, Ivory Coast, South Africa, etc., were common knowledge. Stories of water riots, disconnections from piped networks, unprecedented hikes in tariffs even in cities such as London and Paris were used effectively by campaigners in Delhi to bring home the maladies of water privatisation. 22 Under immense pressure generated by these campaigns, the Delhi government withdrew its loan application to the World Bank. The Delhi Water Supply and Sewerage Project, as proposed by PWC, was scrapped with this withdrawal, and the 24/7 project also was put on hold. In fact, the general trend, the world over, was of private companies withdrawing. They either wrapped up operations voluntarily or were forced to go—like in Cochabamba—due to cancellation of contract.
These withdrawals marked the failure of one model of privatisation, that is, the extensive model of long-term, high-risk build–operate–own contracts. Water corporations, however, moved forward through innovation. They tried to negotiate short-term, low-risk management contracts with minimal investments. Local private firms dealing in water supply came up in middle-income countries. Piecemeal privatisation came to be seen as a workable solution both for dealing with resource scarcity as well as resistance movements.
In Delhi, slums and resettlement colonies ’unserviced’ by piped supply became a fertile ground for these market innovations. DJB water tankers, sent as a humanitarian measure—negotiated by the pulls and pressures of electoral democracy—were always inadequate. Small and medium water enterprises, individual loans for borewell digging through micro-finance instruments, water ATMs as mechanisms for decentralised supply were freely experimented with.
Conclusion
In India and much of the third world, ‘private’ has always coexisted with ‘public’ in water supply. The private operates at all levels, ranging from individual efforts to access and augment water supply to organised collective efforts, crisscrossing nebulous legal-illegal demarcations. It includes a range of actions—residents of planned middle-class colonies tapping extra water by illegally fixing booster pumps on water mains; new housing societies making their own arrangements for water; organised tanker suppliers extracting water by illegally boring wells; slum dwellers’ diversions and pilferages from municipal mains and network of ‘spaghetti’ pipes running through slums and unauthorised colonies arranged on private initiative, etc. These private solutions most often operated at the back of the state, though always in its shadow. The very existence of these solutions signalled a failure on the part of the state to provide for citizens’ basic needs adequately. Nevertheless, long-term goals for water provisioning were framed in terms of extending the state’s capacity to provide good quality water in good enough quantity for all. The state remained the dominant supplier. The paradigmatic shift towards attempts at extensive or later piecemeal privatisation presaged an era of institutionalised privatisation. The rights-bearing citizens of the welfare model were sought to be transmogrified into consumers in the water market. They were to become consumers not just of water but of loans and dreams as well.
Footnotes
Notes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.