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The water crisis
(M Salimuddin)

In the early '50s, some US think tanks were speculating on the use of oil as a weapon--its possibilities, scenarios and counter measures against its possible use. We all recall the actual use of oil as a weapon some twenty years later after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.

This time the talk is about the dwindling water resources worldwide. Ninety-seven percent of the earth's water
is the salty ocean. It is completely unusable for farming or drinking. Another 2.5 percent is trapped in the world's most inaccessible snowfields and glaciers. The rest--about half percent of all the water in the world--is ours to use. Over the last 100 years, alongwith the population explosion, the global water demand has doubled every two years. But water supplies have not grown. In fact, they are shrinking.

According to the World Bank, by the year 2025, the amount of water available to each person in the Middle East and North Africa will have dropped by 80 per cent in a single life time. Egypt's water supply is expected to shrink by 30 per cent, Nigeria's down by 40 per cent and Kenya will plummet by 50 per cent--all in less than a decade. The situation is no better in Iran, Iraq and Jordan.

In the Middle East, battles and tension over oil go back only 40 years, but battles for water go back over 5,000 years. In Beijing in one of the worst droughts in the past century, the city's reservoirs are left partly filled as it received only 60 per cent of the normal rainfall. In Spain, a four-year drought has cut farm production in half.

Pakistan is already in the midst of a serious drought leading to an acute shortage of water. The four provinces are engaged in a war of words over water allocation quotas. It is happening all over the world. Water wars are tearing Africa apart. According to the World Bank, over 80 countries are already facing severe water shortages.

Most of the people around the world, including Pakistan, are now buying their drinking water. Others are condemned to drink the contaminated water oozing out of the taps. They still consider themselves privileged as most do not have this facility of running tap water. According to World Bank estimates, one billion people or 16 per cent of humanity have poor access to clean drinking water. This will go up to 2.5 billion people or 40 per cent of humanity by 2025 if remedial measures are not taken now.

When oil prices went up, we looked for substitutes--natural gas, biogas, gasohol, nuclear and solar energies etc. But there is no substitute for water. As the demand increases and the supply of fresh water decreases, those who control it, store it, own it and know how to get more of it will yield as much influence in world affairs as OPEC does today. This potential in the water system's improvements has given birth to what Fortune magazine calls a 'water industry'.

Unlike oil, the water industry is not mainly about finding new supplies. It is about infrastructure. The object is purifying the water collected from wells, rivers and rain and distributing it with total reliability to absolutely every one. The job does not stop with drinking water. It also encompasses treating waste water or sewage, an area just as big and just as complex. Doing it right requires keeping a huge, modern, multi-billion rupee network of pipes, pumps and plants in excellent condition and operating the network efficiently.

Many countries, including Pakistan, have entrusted their water systems to government establishments--and they are failing miserably. These establishments have allowed their systems to decay. Many governments are now privatizing their water systems. Private corporations now upgrade the antiquated infrastructures. They do it by running the systems far more cheaply than governments can, then recycle the savings to upgrade the physical plant. Some of the world's 30 biggest cities have by now privatized their water supply systems; others are in the process. The water industry is now a 400 billion dollar business with about 5 per cent of the globe's population getting their supplies from private corporations.

We are all familiar with the water crisis in Pakistan and long term projections are no better than those for the
rest of the world. The bulk of our population even today does not have access to good clean tap water and by
2025, even the minority will lose this privilege. We have four possible ways of overcoming the looming crisis--build dams, manufacture desalination plants, locate new sources of water and update our existing water storage and distribution systems.

One keeps hearing about the construction of more dams but nothing concrete has so far emerged. It obviously needs a huge capital outlay and substantial time for completion. An important source of clean water could be the design and manufacture of desalination plants. Very little work seems to have been done in this field. Some R&D establishment dealing with water resources could undertake this project.

Looking for extra sources for water, particularly in Balochistan, could be very rewarding. In fact, a lot of work was done in the mid '70s and a number of sources, even with water under tremendous pressure were located, but work was abandoned after a US-based Pakistani engineer was killed in an ambush while working on one of the sites.

All the solutions discussed so far could be termed as medium to long term approaches towards enhancing water availability. Updating, modernizing, replacing defective pumps and pipes is the only short-term measure. This task could be undertaken immediately by privatizing the water supply systems in selected major cities. It does not involve huge financial outlays since most of the contracting can be done on a Built, Operate and Transfer (BOT) basis. In most of our cities, the shortage of water is not the problem. It is its storage and distribution. Thus private tankers are now filling this void and doing a thriving business.

We are running short of time--and water--and unless we start now we might find ourselves in an even worst crisis than what we are now going through. The relatively limited water supply and established infrastructure must be managed more effectively to meet increasing demands. Future supplies should come mainly from conservation, recycling, reuse and improved water-use efficiency rather than from ambitious and costly development projects.

The News 7/7/2000