WITH all attention being paid on building big dams, provision of potable water and sanitation for both rural and urban areas is another important area of development.

According to Unicef, the lack of access to safe water and sanitation has serious repercussions on the quality of life of a community enjoys.

Potable water directly adds to the development by decreasing the mortality rates, especially in children, thereby, decreasing the health expenditures of both the parents and the state.

Even those children, who luckily manage to escape death, suffer the lack of water infrastructure. Girls, in particular, are not educated as they are busy fetching water themselves or tending younger children as their mothers spend a large part of their day fetching water.

Overall productivity is low as there are frequent outbreaks of water-borne diseases, leading to illnesses, making national growth rates decline. In short, without provision of potable water and proper sanitation, sustainable development is impossible.

Our potable water provision faces the same problem as the irrigation water. The infrastructure doesn’t fulfil the needs of all the people so it has to be extended. Secondly, whatever infrastructure that is there is in bad shape because of lack of maintenance.

According to the Global Water Supply and Sanitation Assessment 2000 Report by the WHO, only 88 per cent of the Pakistan’s population has access to clean drinking water. In case of sanitation, the situation is grimmer as only 61 per cent have this facility. These figures may appear quite encouraging to some but as recent outbreak of hepatitis in urban areas has shown, access doesn’t mean proper access here.

Moreover, continuous investments are needed as old infrastructure is under great stress due to increasing population.

Pakistan lacks funds, especially after the earthquake, to do the modernization and extension of its urban as well as rural water infrastructure. This lack of funds is augmented by the lack of technical expertise in this area.

Fortunately, the current war on terrorism has created a very favourable atmosphere for concessionary lending to Pakistan. Almost all international development financial institutions are ready to lend. Pakistan is one of the highly urbanized countries and the migration rate from rural areas is not slowing much. Facilities should be built taking in view the need of at least 20 years.

There are few things that have to be taken into account while planning for these projects. First, the conditionalities that the World Bank will ask Pakistan to agree to are very important. There is risk that the World Bank will ask for some kind of privatization of water delivery or sanitation.

The neo-liberal ideology calling for retrenchment of public sector since 80s has been rejuvenated with the opening of services market under the WTO and creation of new service multinationals. All want free and open access to developing country’s services to make profits without taking any of the associated risks.

Big companies like the Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux, Vivendi, Saur-Bouygues, Anglican Water and the United Utilities work in different areas of water sector in many countries and make billions of dollars of profits. They lobby their governments and international institutions for access to new markets and then adopt monopolistic and collusive behaviour to increase profits.

The World Bank is at the forefront of imposing conditionalities on developing countries, which include the opening of water sector to foreign multinationals. According to its 2002 revised water sector plan, around 40 per cent of its loans include the conditionality of private participation. It is, therefore, important for Pakistan to ask for loan but to not agree to any intrusion of multinationals.

Secondly, as pointed out in the World Bank’s recent report on water resources in Pakistan (2005), there is low knowledge base and the quality of project implementation is poor.

Due to low knowledge base, there are delays and frequent changes in plans and due to poor implementation there are time and cost overruns, corruption and inefficiencies. Funds and technical expertise can be acquired from the World Bank or other lending agencies but groundwork has to be done by Pakistanis.

Proper surveys for fieldwork, selection of competent individuals and transparency, therefore, should be emphasized as they will not only decrease costs but also increase the reach of our scarce water resources.

Finally, it is now accepted that in any project which does not specifically make provisions to take care of the poorest section of a community, will fail to provide much benefit to them.

If the new water projects are to provide potable water and sanitation to those who belong to the lowest strata, whether economically or socially, special arrangements have to be made for low demand, lack of property rights, and cultural practices favouring informal/raw resources (wells, rivers etc.,) over formal ones.

Out-of-box thinking, as done in the Orangi Pilot Project, may be essential for providing service, without involving the municipality/government with a long-term subsidy.