The Big Thirst, page 32
The Yamuna flows for fourteen miles along the eastern side of Delhi, mostly hidden from easy public access, or even routine public view, by Delhi’s ring road, an eight-lane highway that circles the city. By the time the river leaves the city limits, twenty-two drains have emptied into it. The Yamuna just gets dirtier as it goes. It is a real-life river Styx. The venerated Ganges River is, if conceivable, dirtier. And the Yamuna is the main tributary of the Ganges, contributing 60 percent of its flow.
It is easy to get discouraged about water in India—and the state of the Yamuna is a perfect example. It’s hard to imagine, in a country that can compete in brain jobs with the United States, that can send science missions to the Moon and put six billionaires among the fifty richest people in the world, it’s hard to believe that it treats its great rivers this way.
But two things are worth remembering. First, India is capable of dramatic, even inspirational, change. In 1998, responding to pollution that was turning Delhi’s air into a toxic soup, the country’s Supreme Court ordered all public transit vehicles in Delhi, all taxis, and the entire fleet of small, ubiquitous, three-wheeled vehicles called auto rickshaws, converted to low-emission compressed-natural-gas fuel. Today, all ten thousand of Delhi’s public buses run on CNG, as do all five thousand taxicabs, along with everyone of the signature green-and-yellow auto rickshaws. Conversion of the privately owned auto-rickshaw fleet was painful, but also impressive: There are at least 53,000 of the auto rickshaws, barreling with suicidal speed and heedlessness along every street and through every intersection in Delhi. (New York City has thirteen thousand yellow cabs.) Delhi’s air is still often gray and smoky, but it would be dramatically worse without the shift to CNG fuel of the last decade.36
Second, while India seems to have accommodated itself to some truly intolerable water circumstances for a modern nation—no major cities with a basic, always-on water service, one in six people relying on water that is transported by foot—we all get used to appalling circumstances, some just as stunning to outsiders as India’s water compromises. The public schools in many of the great cities of America—Philadelphia, Detroit, Los Angeles—aren’t just bad, they have become nonfunctional: ineffective at teaching, often not even safe. The schools in the nation’s capital are, quite simply, a national disgrace. That’s a failure at least equal to intermittent water service in Bangalore.
In both cases, change is hard at least in part because the rich have opted out of the public system, and the people who are left often have dramatically less money and political clout. Well-off Indians create their own twenty-four-hour water systems; well-off urban Americans send their children to private schools. Poor Indians don’t have the power to demand improved water service, and fear they might not have the money to pay for it; low-income Americans don’t have the time and influence to insist that public schools do a proper job of educating their children.
As with schools, there is no quick fix to water problems.
India is in the middle of a water crisis, but it is a slow-motion crisis, which is why it is important not just in India but for everyone beyond India. India’s water problems can seem as hard to clean up as the Yamuna River—so messy that they are beyond solution. Where do you start?
But most of India’s water problems aren’t really water problems, they are people problems—problems with how they think about water and how they manage it. That is the most important lesson for Indians and the most important warning for the rest of us. It means the problems are, in fact, solvable—because we let them happen in the first place. You can have a perfectly good water system—as much of India did—that you let slip away because you don’t take it seriously.
That’s a lesson that Americans, and those in much of the rest of the world, are in danger of unlearning. We upgrade our running shoes every year, we upgrade our cell phones every eighteen months, we upgrade our laptops every three years. But our water systems have become like a feature of the natural world, a kind of man-made geography that we have come to believe needs no more attention than a waterfall or a mountain.
It is just the opposite. Water systems fall behind fast, and catch up slowly, and only with grinding effort. There is no leapfrogging over an aging water system, the way, for instance, cell phone service or satellite TV service or wireless Internet service allow quick leaps forward. You can’t beam water through the air.
ONE BIG CITY IN INDIA has brought back always-on water service—with both remarkable effort and remarkable results.
Navi Mumbai is a gawky adolescent of a municipality on India’s west coast, whose many personalities can be hard to reconcile. Navi Mumbai’s main thoroughfare, a modern, high-speed, four-lane boulevard that runs along the Arabian Sea, is called Palm Beach Marg (Palm Beach Highway). Palm trees line the median, and there are mangroves in places along the seashore. Navi Mumbai has dozens of apartment blocks, but many are somber, sterile, Soviet-style concrete towers, un-Palm-Beach-like, in fact, utterly untropical. Navi Mumbai’s commercial zone stretches for ten miles, and includes gleaming glass office campuses, like those in Gurgaon. Wipro is here, and so is Tata. Right alongside the office parks are chemical factories and oil refineries. The city’s old central business district is a few uninspired blocks of tired concrete buildings, but its parkways are home to elegant hotels and a half-dozen flashy shopping malls. Navi Mumbai’s taxes on new cars are so low that many well-off Indians come here to purchase luxury vehicles—in 2009, 996 luxury cars were sold in Navi Mumbai.37
But a better indicator of Navi Mumbai’s economic well-being is a fat green water main that runs right alongside Palm Beach Marg for many kilometers. Like the factories alongside the office parks, the prominently visible water main isn’t attractive. For much of its length it is two meters in diameter, a single pipe big enough for anyone under six feet tall to stand inside, and it is painted the uninspired, flat green of bridge girders and boiler rooms. But the water main is the spine of a system that, by the end of 2010, supplied 24/7 water to 65 percent of Navi Mumbai’s residents—continuous water, anytime they turned on their taps, to 800,000 citizens, including all slum dwellers. That water main would make always-on water service available to every resident in 2011.
Vijay Nahata is Navi Mumbai’s municipal commissioner, the equivalent of its mayor. With a grin, he says, “For water, we decided to have the ideal system.”
Navi Mumbai was conceived around 1970 as a planned community designed to take pressure off Mumbai, which even then was bursting with unmanageable growth. So unlike many Indian cities that are hundreds of years old, Navi Mumbai is only forty years old, laid out with care—and it has attracted residents exhausted by Mumbai’s crowding and cost. The city has 1.2 million people—double what it had just ten years ago. It is large and fast-growing, but relatively small by Indian standards—about twenty-eighth in size.
The effort to make Navi Mumbai the first modern Indian city with continuous water started in 2002, and came from the opposite problem: chronic water shortages. The city was buying its water from two state agencies that couldn’t keep up with Navi Mumbai’s demand. The city was routinely receiving one-third less water than it needed. Searching around for its own water supply, Navi Mumbai ended up buying a dam from another government agency that couldn’t afford to finish it, and once that dam was finished, it more than tripled the city’s supply.
“When we got our own dedicated source of water,” says Sanjay Desai, executive engineer for water in Navi Mumbai, “the idea of 24/7 water came up.”
“We liked the idea,” says city engineer Mohan Dagaonkar. “We knew it can be done. How it can be done is another question.”
“There were hundreds of hurdles to making this happen,” says Desai.
The idea of Navi Mumbai being a “planned” city seems to have seeped thoroughly into its culture. The city counts, and reports, on almost everything. At the end of 2009, for instance, city land had 157,283 trees, and the city operated 320 public toilet facilities, with “total seats of 3,626.” Navi Mumbai has become obsessive about good sewers, good landfills, and recycling. Precisely to avoid the cross-contamination between water mains and sewer pipes that plagues the rest of urban India, it is standard practice in Navi Mumbai for the water main to run alongside the road, buried one meter down, and the sewer line to run in the center of the road, buried two meters down. No possibility of confusion, and almost no chance that a sewer leak will find the water main.
City officials take a sly pride in all this, because they know how unusual it is. Says city engineer Dagaonkar, “We do know where our pipes are. Here everything is on the network—it’s on a geographic information system”—plotted down to the inch with GPS coordinates.
It has taken six years of planning, politicking, and construction to move the city’s government and residents to 24/7 water. (Hoover Dam took five years.)
The big green water main had to be laid twenty-one miles from the reservoir to the city. Every home and business got a new, tamperproof water meter, and the city’s 220 miles of water mains were inspected, repaired, or replaced. Every dwelling needed a supply pipe, including those in slum clusters and villages, which had traditionally been supplied with water tankers. And there were lots of meetings to explain that water bills would go up—with 24/7 service, they double, from Rs 65 to Rs 130 a month, that is, from about $1.50 a month to $3. “People were opposed to the increase,” says municipal commissioner Nahata. “But it was small relative to income.”
City engineer Dagaonkar says public support took time to muster. “Everyone wanted 24/7 water—they love the idea of 24/7,” he says. “But they didn’t want meters. They didn’t want increased rates. They wanted us to do it for free. It took five or six years to convince them.”
And one thing was evident—with roads being dug up for water mains, with the huge new green water supply pipe moving into town in kilometer-long leaps, with every home being visited to receive a new water meter, it was clear where the money would be going.
Navi Mumbai has discovered another technocratic technique that is not common in Indian governments: outsourcing. Navi Mumbai government is relatively lean, and many functions are outsourced with contracts, which include tight performance standards, and then managed. Garbage is outsourced, sewage treatment is outsourced, and the operation of the water supply system is outsourced. City officials say they find it easier to insist on performance from their contractors than they would from an army of employees. “We find that once you have a permanent employee in a job, they become lazy,” says Nahata. “That’s why we’ve outsourced.”
The rollout of continuous water appears to have actually reduced water use per person in the city—from seventy-five gallons a day to sixty gallons a day, in part because of the metering, in part because people don’t have to hoard water just in case. And Navi Mumbai has gone to the trouble and expense of installing something not of much use in most Indian cities: fire hydrants. Now that the city’s water mains will have water pressure all the time, it will be possible to roll up to a fire hydrant and find water in an emergency.
Navi Mumbai appears to be the very leading edge of a critical shift in attitude. Just ten years ago, the idea of taking an Indian city from intermittent to continuous water wasn’t even discussed, according to V. S. Chary, from Hyderabad’s Administrative Staff College, the country’s leading proponent of bringing Indian cities back to 24/7 water. “When I would talk to people about it here in India, they would look at me puzzled. They think I’m a fool.”
Chary now has a roster of Indian cities that have committed to moving to 24/7 water and are receiving grant money to help them. It’s not four cities, it’s not a dozen, or three dozen. The list of cities publicly committed to restoring 24/7 water service is forty-five.
“It’s not a tipping point,” he says. “That is yet to come. But it is huge. It is a delight.”
In Navi Mumbai, many who have gotten 24/7 water—especially the poorest residents—have a different life as a result. Sharda Sonawane lives in the slum area called Shivaji Nagar, in a small apartment with her husband and her in-laws. They got 24/7 water at the end of 2008—a sink with a tap, on the wall in the main room. Alongside the sink sits a small, portable washing machine for clothes.
The Sonawanes used to stand in line, along with everyone else in Shivaji Nagar, to use a public tap, an hour or more of waiting a day. “I worked for a cosmetics company then,” says Sharda, “and I was often late for work because I was standing in line. My wages would be cut as a result.”
Her mother-in-law, Vandana, a former municipal councilor, says her home was occasionally robbed while she was standing in line for water. “While we stood in line, they would steal things. And because there was so little water, we would use the water in a miserly way. It was not very hygienic—we would use less water for bathing.”
Everyone in the house has regained the precious hours each week they used to stand in line for water.
“We bathe more,” says Vandana, “and the water is clean.”
“We wash clothes every day,” says her daughter-in-law.
The cost of their water has doubled. “Yes, we are paying more,” says Vandana. “But we are getting more water. And it is better water. So we are happy.”
The Shivaji Nagar neighborhood is in some ways representative of Navi Mumbai’s best qualities. Although it is poor, the public pathways are spotless, and there is no stream of raw sewage running along the streets.
Bhimrao Rethod is an auto mechanic in his mid-thirties who has lived in Shivaji Nagar for thirty years, since he was a little boy. He shares an apartment with a total of eight people—his parents, his brother, his wife, and their three kids. As a boy, he says, “I used to stand in the queue, sometimes all night, I would skip school to stand in line. And then, we wouldn’t get that much water.”
How is the tap inside his apartment better? Rethod laughs.
“First, you save time. Second, you don’t have to store the water. I can go to work on time. Illnesses and sicknesses are reduced. It’s a hassle-free life! My children have 24/7 water!” Rethod has been speaking the local language through a translator. But his enthusiasm causes him to switch into English.
“Even rich people in Bangalore and Delhi don’t have 24/7 water. I’m a lucky man, and I am richer than those people!”
9
It’s Water. Of Course It’s Free
You can “own” a glass of water, but only until you drink it and pee. Once you pee, you don’t own that water anymore.
—Mike Young,
water economist,
University of Adelaide,
Australia
WHEN YOU CHECK INTO one of the Starwood chain’s Four Points hotels in the United States and Canada (there are 109), you’ll find a couple bottles of water in your room. Nothing unusual about finding bottled water in a hotel room—it has become standard, as if the hotels didn’t have much faith in their own tap water, and the glasses and ice bucket they provide.1 What is unusual is that the bottled water is a gift from Four Points—no extra charge for the water, any more than there’s a charge for using the bottle of hand cream by the bathroom sink. Four Points puts a little tag around the neck of the bottles:
“It’s water. Of course it’s free.”
The water is a treat, and the tag is just the right touch of hospitality. Pause a moment and appreciate that Four Points has gotten the customer service right, and it has picked a way of presenting that service with an edge of irony, guaranteed to make its guests smile.
“It’s water. Of course it’s free.”
But why is the tag funny, exactly?
First, of course, it’s funny because in many hotels almost nothing these days is free—from the WiFi to the gym. And of course, bottled water itself is almost never free. But it’s really funny because everywhere else in life water is in fact free, or essentially free. Can you believe the nerve of all those other hotels, charging you for something as elemental as water?
Four Points underscores the idea on its Web site, where it has a page dedicated to the free bottled water it offers. Underneath the slogan “It’s water. Of course it’s free” is the line “What’s next? Paying for air?” The page is illustrated with a picture of a crystalline waterfall with a sign propped in the current reading “$3.99.”2
The silliness is self-evident. Who can put a price on water? Who would put a price on water?
In fact, we have even gotten used to paying for air—at least in one circumstance. Most gas stations now charge 50 cents to use the air hose to fill your tires; if you can find the water spigot at a gas station, though, you can use it without charge.
Four Points hotels is tapping something primal in our relationship to water—we don’t think it should cost us anything. The water bills most people in the developed world get each month from their local utility are nominal—in the United States, it’s $1 or $1.50 a day for always-on, never-fail, unlimited water service at home. At that rate, you have to flush the toilet a hundred times before you’ve spent a dollar on water. London’s water utility, Thames Water, provides clean water to one of seven people in the United Kingdom, and brags that its unmetered customers pay 88 pence per day (about US$1.30) and that its customers with water meters pay 73 pence (US$1.08).3
In some places, water service is almost literally free. Traverse City, Michigan, the charming tourist town along Lake Michigan’s eastern shore, charges $10 for the first 4,500 gallons of water per month. The next 25,400 gallons also cost $10—total. In Traverse City, you can use 30,000 gallons of water a month—1,000 gallons a day, enough to take twenty-five baths— and pay $20. Forget flushing the toilet—in Traverse City, you can fill a swimming pool for less than the price of a bottle of Merlot.
