The advertisers and salespeople know best when it comes to our needs; they know people are prepared to pay for whatever we perceive to be necessary needs, even those that we normally take for granted. Water is one of them; ""Aqua"" has become a synonym for drinking water in our cities, and drugstore clerks like to convince us that costly ozone-purified water is as vital as the air we breathe.
In a few years, Jakarta residents are warned, this commodity -- for that is what water has become -- will get increasingly scarce, given the limited supply of our main rivers and reservoirs that deliver water to the capital. People in northern and western parts of Jakarta are used to the hardship of having to set aside money to buy clean water for bathing and cooking each day; while the rest of us recklessly waste it and complain about the poor services we are getting along with the city taxes and fees on water.
Today is World Water Day, and much of the ranting and raving about water services have been discussed in the past few days at an international forum in Mexico City. As expected, the highlight of the talks -- this year themed ""Local Actions for a Global Challenge"" -- has been the now-classic debate on whether water should be handled by public or private companies. Those for public water management got a boost from a French mayor whose town is home to the private water firm Suez -- he described how his administration had taken over a private firm and turned it into a ""healthy"" public one without drastically raising prices.
And the manager of a city water company in Indonesia also related how he could avoid privatization by improving efficiency and services to the people of Surakarta.
Good for him and for Surakarta residents -- but beyond the wars about globalization, evils of privatization and the grueling fight against graft in public companies, this city of around 12 million needs clean water now and in the near and distant future, regardless of who is providing it. Indonesia's infant mortality rate ranks as one of the world's worst with an annual average of 3 million deaths from water-borne diseases -- preventable diseases made worse by a lack of sanitation and access to clean water. And as we consume filtered, treated recycled water due to a lack of fresh, clean water, we would certainly like to be assured that we are not drinking any trace of our own sewage, whoever handles the management and distribution of water to our homes.
Privatization is associated with greed for profit, while the state and city-owned firms come with the image of red tape, apart from graft and nepotism. When it comes to water, care for consumers is highly questionable in either the public or private sector. As heroic managers and mayors manage to clean up public water firms, the private sector finds it still needs to prove, with results, that it has the intrinsic nature of having to beat the competition with the best prices and services. And while residents in a Bolivian city are reportedly on the brink of driving out a subsidiary of the Suez water company for failing to cater to the poor, in Jakarta we are not quite sure that a similar way would be the solution for this capital, despite all the complaints -- which were more or less the same before private management was allowed.
A cool-headed look at what is being done to improve services, along with learned lessons from other cities, is needed for everyone's sake. Reports on the Mexico City talks, which ends Wednesday have touched on the experience of ""citizen oversight"" groups, which they have in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where citizens sit on a council to oversee water services. An option for wholesale privatization was also looked at in the talks hosted by the World Water Council.
Our Constitution indeed rules that vital resources should be managed by the state. What the ordinary consumer would hope for is that the state powers do not translate that into a monopoly, which can serve us any way they please; and that the private firms allowed to profit from such a valuable resource maintain that trust.
