After a hard day of peddling his bicycle taxi through historic Kota Tua in West Jakarta, Siib Riyadi does not go directly home to his wife. Instead he heads to his neighbor's place to use his piped water to clean the daily grim from his own bike.
"The groundwater I use at home is salty so I can't use it to wash my bike. The salt will rush my bike. So I made arrangements with my neighbor to use his piped water and paid him Rp 50,000 (US$4.50) a month for it," said Siib, who stays in a rented room by the Pasar Ikan market near Kota Tua.
Siib uses that water not only for cleaning his bike, his sole source of income, but also for drinking and cooking.
In another and more remote poor neighborhood in Marunda, North Jakarta, the residents got some relief when a private water company, PT Aetra Air Jakarta, installed water hydrants in their neighborhood.
"Some 300 households no longer have to send a family member to walk for an hour to fetch water," a company press release said.
Michelle Kooy, a Canadian researcher who has spent three years studying the history of Jakarta's water supply, said well-managed water hydrants can be a solution as the poor who did not always want individual pipes at each house.
"Having a pipe, given what the water pressure is like, may not benefit them. Poor residents have developed economic strategies to stretch their budgets to meet their need of water.
"They can have four or five sources of water for different uses. They may use groundwater for bathing and washing, water from water vendors for cooking, and refillable bottled water for drinking. They often pay more than what the rich forked out," she said.
Kooy was struck by how the mismanagement of water hydrants today resembles issues of city water usage from a hundred years ago.
"In Jakarta in the 1920s some Dutch engineers observed: think that water hydrants are good option for the poor", but the poor in the 1920s were actually paying 50 percent more than the rich were paying." here it is 2009 and conditions are still the same," said Kooy.
"Water vendors today are selling water at around Rp 3,000 for 40 liter," she said.
At that price, the buyer is paying Rp 75,000 per cubic meter. The water sold at public water hydrants should only cost Rp 1,050 per cubic meter. Piped water, graded between levels 2 to 2A which cater to low- and middle-low-income households, costs between Rp 1,050 and Rp 5,500 per cubic meter.
She said the problem, as in the past, rested with the operation of the hydrants. Most of the time, she said, the hydrants were made and passed to the locals without sufficient training in how to maintain and operate the public facility.
"Water hydrants are always taken over by local leaders or somebody *powerful*. It is a business. They charge more than they have to pay. Usually the water operator pays for the license from the water company and then he manages a whole crew of water vendors," she said.
Private management goes against a guiding principle of a public water company: The hydrants are meant to be managed by the community for the community.
"They hand over the hydrants to a person or a group without building a system, or giving financial training, or setting up a cooperative. I have found in these very poor communities water is a business and a very good opportunity for income.
"You can't just provide infrastructure, you have to train people how to work together, figure out among themselves who will handle the money and all that," she said.
Without those measures, she said, the poor will still be paying much more than they should.
- JP/Mariani Dewi
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