A development soap opera

ASIA FILE

Is there a conspiracy against the poor?" This is what the Asian Development Bank (ADB) asked at the start of its second Water Week confabulation in Manila last month, which some 350 experts from all over Asia attended.

"Why is it," it questioned, "that after concerted efforts spanning decades, the poor still don't have access to safe water? Have conventional mindsets stymied progress in this direction?"

Like ADB, we also wonder. We've been talking for years about water for all. We have world water forums meeting at regular three-year intervals.

We have the Global Water Partnership, the World Water Council, the World Commission for Water in the 21st century, and any number of non-governmental organisations that make water their business.

And we have governments who always swear by their commitment to eradicate poverty and whose leaders are always travelling to international forums to make that commitment known.

Yet over 1.1 billion of the world's population still lack access to safe drinking water and 2.4 billion still don't have sanitation.

Recent studies indicate that, by 2025, two out of every three people in the world will face water shortage. In Asia, 19 per cent of the population goes without safe water and 52 per cent without sanitation.

The problem will get only worse. If the demographers are correct, Asia's urban population "" with it, urban poverty "" will double in the next 25 years.

Not that we don't have targets. We do. In 2002, at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, the international community pledged to reduce by half "" mark that "" the number of people who don't have safe water or basic sanitation by 2015. Full water coverage, in all its aspects, is supposed to be realised only by 2025. But what does it imply?

According to the World Panel on Financing Water Infrastructure, even to reach the modest 2015 target would require several hundred thousand new water connections to be made every day. Is that possible? In a country like India, where most of the world's poor live, is that even feasible? If we couldn't do it in the past 56 years, can we do it in next 10?

We do also have an idea of the cost of meeting this target. The World Panel says we would need to invest at least $100 billion every year in addition to what our budgets normally provide for. But where will this money come from? Governments are always broke. Among international organisations, to quote the World Panel again, "Water is surprisingly an orphan."

There's not even enough reliable information to define a strategy. When India claims 92 per cent of its urban population and 86 per cent of its rural population have access to water supply, how do we know it's the truth?

Has there been a ground check? And what kind of water do people have access to? There aren't any ponds and rivers in India that aren't polluted. And the piped water that the municipalities supply? Would you, honestly, drink it off the tap?

Conspiracy or not, it's surely a nice arrangement and suits a lot of people. Conferences are called, commitments are made, slogans are raised, reports are published, and everybody feels happy that something is being done.

Then more conferences are held, creating more travelling opportunities, to renew old commitments and make new ones. And so the cycle goes, on and on. It just has to. If the problems are solved, what happens to the problem solvers?

Remember "education for all"? Back in 1990, at a world conference, governments committed themselves to make quality basic education available to all "" note this "" also by 2015. How are they following it up? A good example comes from Bangladesh.

The Primary and Mass Education Division of the government constituted a National Assessment Group, which appointed a technical sub-group for education for all, which constituted a core group for preparing an assessment report, which organised two national workshops to review the draft of the assessment report.

Then a government delegation travelled to Dakar, Senegal, in April 2000, to present a progress report at the World Education Forum.

Meanwhile, universal primary education remains a distant dream. Gender discrimination persists, especially in south Asia. The urban-rural gap keeps widening. Illiteracy is still large (it's 60 per cent in Bangladesh). Dropout rates are high. And all too often, the quality of education remains unacceptably low.

Now, there's a new twist to this development soap opera. The private sector is getting increasingly into the act, with official encouragement, to do what the governments can't, and the private sector is not a charity.

Thus, we have a fine situation indeed "" no or little service on one hand and costly service, getting costlier, on the other. Somewhere in between lurk the poor, left out of what everybody says is their basic right, like a safe drink of water.