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Your letters: Banning water monopoly
Running on empty: Residents of Komba city in Flores, East Nusa Tenggara (NTT), queue for clean water during the dry season in October last year
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Running on empty: Residents of Komba city in Flores, East Nusa Tenggara (NTT), queue for clean water during the dry season in October last year. Water scarcities hamper the daily lives of people in many parts of NTT during the dry season.(JP/Markus Makur) (NTT), queue for clean water during the dry season in October last year. Water scarcities hamper the daily lives of people in many parts of NTT during the dry season.(JP/Markus Makur)
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span class="inline inline-center">Running on empty: Residents of Komba city in Flores, East Nusa Tenggara (NTT), queue for clean water during the dry season in October last year. Water scarcities hamper the daily lives of people in many parts of NTT during the dry season. (JP/Markus Makur)
This refers to an article titled 'Court bans monopoly on water resources,' (The Jakarta Post, Feb. 20). Congratulations, Indonesia.
This is a huge step forward in water resources governance. The law on water resources should, in the first place, have never been imposed, since it represented the narrow idealistic angle of water privatization of the World Bank.
In 2003 I commented on the draft law and came, on the same grounds, to the same conclusions as the Constitutional Court 16 years later.
Then the competent authorities acknowledged that the law didn't mean privatization.
On a much larger scale, water concessions have been issued to irrigation and hydropower companies, though these use permits exceed the sustainable effective renewable water volumes of the local water resources.
The government shall have full control over the water systems.
The government has an inclusive responsibility under the Constitution to control for the greatest prosperity of the people the use of land, water and natural resources, sustainability of the resources and the right, for example, to clean water for all Indonesian people.
However, the last point is delusive since in rural and semi-urban areas the water supply is not well organized, even in urban areas in Jakarta.
In fact, it means that the right to clean water also includes natural surface and groundwater, which in populated areas are in a miserable plight both quantity and quality wise.
Development of local public water administrations and integrated water/wastewater (environmental) services is an urgent question of equity.
To achieve the clean-water-for-all quest, whether provided or natural, the next step is to integrate the services with the features of water bodies.
This could gradually help to clean the water resources and reduce the inequity in human rights between people living downstream and upstream of the water systems.
At the moment, Indonesia is voluntarily meeting the annual recurrent costs of risks, expenses and human and economic losses caused by the defunct water resources management, which may rise up 3-4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).
There is an urgent need to establish long-term predictive precautionary sustainability limits of growth for all natural resources, whether non-living or living, impose respective regulations, laws and misuser- or polluter-pays sanctions and properly enforce them.
These all help Indonesia to pursue improved human rights and opportunities to enhance the declared new development frontier of a blue economy.
Pasi Lehmusluoto
Jakarta
