But that's anything but in Karachi, where people go days without getting water from city trucks, sometimes forcing them to use groundwater contaminated with salt.
A recent drought has only made the problem worse. And as the city of roughly 18 million people rapidly grows, the water shortages are only expected to get worse.
"During the last three months they haven't supplied a single drop of water in my neighborhood," protester Yasmeen Islam said. "It doesn't make us happy to come on the roads to protest but we have no choice anymore."
Misbah Fareed, a senior official with the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board that runs the city's water supplies, said that only meets about half the city's needs 1.2 billion gallons a day.
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Karachi's water distribution network has exacerbated the problem by forcing much of the city to get its water through tankers instead of directly from pipes.
Even people in the richest areas of the city get their water through tankers that come a few times a week to fill up underground cisterns.
But criminals have illegally tapped into the city's water pipes and set up their own distribution points where they siphon off water and sell it.
"I personally know some people previously associated with drug mafias who now switched to the water tanker business," Fareed said. "Just imagine how lucrative the business is."
Other areas of Pakistan pump massive amounts of groundwater. But in the coastal city of Karachi, the underground water is too salty to drink.
The water shortage is exacerbated by Karachi's massive population. Pakistani military operations and American drone strikes in the northern tribal regions, as well as natural disasters such as flooding and earthquakes, have pushed people toward a city long seen as the economic heart of Pakistan.
The city is trying to increase the amount of water it gets from the Indus River by building another canal, dubbed the K4 project. But even if they were to get political approval from the capital to take more water from the river, it would take a minimum of four years to build.