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Editorial: A drop of life
Last week Indonesia joined countries who voted in favor of the new United Nations resolution recognizing access to clean water
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ast week Indonesia joined countries who voted in favor of the new United Nations resolution recognizing access to clean water. The vote included 122 nations in favor, none against and 41 abstained. The countries that abstained, including the US, said they regretted that the UN had not waited for the ongoing deliberations on water; they said there was no “right to water and sanitation” as mentioned in the resolution, in an international legal sense. These countries said they wait for a report from the Human Rights Council’s independent expert on human rights on access to safe drinking water and sanitation.
Six years ago then president Megawati Soekarnoputri passed the Indonesian law on water resources, detailing water as a basic right, and obligations of the state as a consequence of that right. Indonesia then has nothing to lose by voting in favor of the above resolution. For us, the most important thing is to make improvements locally.
Indonesians share the paradox of life in many other countries: That the low-income people often pay more for clean water in dense, polluted areas where the water pipes have not reached individual homes.
These people are among the 884 million which Wednesday’s UN General Assembly noted were still with no access to safe drinking water, and more than 2.6 billion lacked access to basic sanitation. Vegetable farmers in the city, for instance, say they pay up to Rp 70,000 (about US$7.80) a month for water, from their average monthly income of Rp 500,000.
In Jakarta alone, the city’s water regulator states that only 56 percent of the population or more than 5 million people have access to safe drinking water.
While our law recognizes water as a right, (it also mentions the payment of fees to water providers) the issue of fees is among those absent in the UN resolution, raising questions of what “the human right to safe drinking water” entails.
Activists have howled over the 2004 law, pointing out that recognition of the role of business in the provision of water makes it a commodity, not a right. Now that the business role is formally recognized, how would we meet the “balance of interests of consumers and service providers,” as stated by the law?
This remains an issue Indonesia must work to resolve, as we host this week a ministerial meeting ahead of the next world summit on the UN Millennium Development Goals. Indonesia is also bound to these goals, which among others call for the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation to be cut in half by 2015.
Taking a look around the increasingly large cement jungle, are we sure all the current buildings under-construction come with proper permits, based on environmental impact studies and spatial planning rules?
Suddenly we hear of deals that cannot be undone on future projects in areas known to be green belts or water catchment areas.
As these new projects would not be the first to erect new malls or hotels in a green belt or water catchment area, people would not be surprised if the answer behind the seemingly generous doling out of permits lies in bribes, which are still way beyond the grasp of anticorruption fighters.
For all the criticism, the water law spells out penalties for anyone found to be guilty of damaging water sources, theoretically meaning that anyone who doles out permits for building in green belts faces imprisonment and a hefty fine. Great laws we have. They just face a greater legacy of resistance.
