Mustn’t commodify water: Experts

Terming the government’s proposed national water policy 2012 (NWP) anti-poor and anti-farmers, the civil society activists on Wednesday said it seems to be beneficial for only “vested interests” and not people at large. They also called for a large scale public outrage to stop it at this stage itself.

The UPA government’s draft NWP proposes privatisation of water supply, ending the government’s role in the sector and also bats for increasing water tariff stating that water needs to be treated as an economic good. The draft policy prepared by the Union ministry of water resources has been put up on the website of the ministry (www.wrmin.nic.in) and has called for comments and suggestions by February 29.

Shripad Dharmadhikary of NGO Manthan Adhyayan Kendra, a mechanical engineer from IIT Bombay who has been working on water related issues for more than a decade, said the policy seems to be inspired from the water policy of the World Bank (WB) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

“Not just is it anti-poor but it is anti-farmers too. To commodify water is a completely backward step. It seems to be inspired from water policies of the WB and ADB as it aims to convert water sector into a market,” Dharmadhikary told DNA.

“If this policy goes through, this could threaten food security as well as farmers may prefer selling water rather than using it for agricultural purposes. It could also prove disastrous as efforts of water privatisation have not shown encouraging results anywhere,” he said.

“It is a right time for people to strongly react on it so that it is stopped right at this stage,” Dharmadhikary added.

Team Anna member Arvind Kejriwal also slammed the government over the proposed water policy. Kejriwal and his NGO Parivartan was instrumental in stalling efforts of the Sheila Dikshit led Delhi government few years ago when the latter was trying to privatise water supply of the national capital. At that time too, the Delhi jal board was apparently inspired and driven by the World Bank in the direction of privatising water supply.

“A similar attempt was made by the Delhi government few years ago. When we examined documents obtained under RTI, we found that it was heavily loaded against the consumers and was meant to favour only few foreign firms,” Kejriwal told DNA.

“It appearas that they (government) is now trying to implement this at the national level. I fail to understand that how economics at national level would be any different from that of a state,” he said.

Another Delhi based activist Himanshu Thakkar, who belongs to South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, also criticised the policy stating that consultations held for draft NWP are “far from adequate and have not be publicised enough to ensure wide participation.”