Ecology: Privatisation of Water in India

The ---------- also requires further liberalisation so you cannot stop at a level but you have to go from the bottom to the top. The core principles of the WTO and the agreement in services are so called 'most favoured nation' means that the same benefits should be given to all the members. Basically Europe cannot have the 'most favoured nation'. No special measures can be taken and the national treatment means that, the foreign enterprises and the domestic enterprises have to be treated equal and so the domestic ones cannot have any special support.

At the moment the ---------------- agreement is being re-negotiated, when it was formed, many of the lobby groups felt that it was not comprehensive enough. And so the further liberalisation negotiations are going on since the year 2000. But not much progress was made before the 4^th WTO ministerial in Doha in November 2001. The negotiations have now entered into a so called request offer phase which basically means that the members are undergoing bilateral negotiations, like giving requests to each other on certain sectors that they would like the other members to open up. This was completed during this autumn and now the offer phase will go on until March this year. Offer means that the countries give replys on the requests that they have, so if they are willing to accept the requests aor make some changes in them or after something else instead.

The actual progress after March would probably be made only in the fifth ministerial in September in Mexico on this issue also. The current --------------- agenda includes water as an environmental service – water collection, water distribution, purification, waste water treatment. End remediation of contaminated water or polluted water. This initiative came from the European community not because everyone wants water to be privatised but because, as I said, the biggest companies are in Europe. This requests, including water, was drafter in secrecy even from the member parliaments of the European Union which received the information basically through leak documents from the European commission through NGOs.

So the requests were sent out before actually getting input or having a discussion with the member groups of the European Union. And we organised a public hearing on May last year about the issue where one of our trade negotiators were saying that, no-no you've got it wrong. Water is not in this? And when we pointed out that it is very clearly in these papers he finally admitted that he has not gone through all the papers. And the Netherlands, for example is opposing of having water in the -------------- negotiations. But then France, who is the base for most of these companies, is supporting it.

The ----------- is a very narrow environmental perspective and no human rights perspective at all. And like with the other WTO policies, everything is done in secrecy and a very undemocratic manner. And hence the deadline for this is the March, we should be very quick to more and figure out what we should do about the issue.

Claire Joy : I think what is really important about the World Trade Organisation and the negotiations that are going on at the moment. Those rules stick, so if governments agree to make commitments in the water sector, in the energy sector and in tourism sectors, if they make those commitments now we are then stuck with privatisation policies in these sectors, both today and in future generations. I the critically thing about the World Trade organisation is that it makes it's rules stick. And if you look at. What Europe wants out of these negotiations, it's very clear they've got a very clear slopping list of demands that they want out of this agreement. The first thing is water and water is at the centre of the European Union's negotiating position at the moment. The second thing is energy and I think Shilpa's comments. The second thing Europe is looking at is for getting countries to open up and liberalise their energy markets. And the third thing is tourism and it's all sorts of that other areas that affect water policy by companies struggling to get access. Once a government opens up on the gas the company their gets the access that it wants to get and I think thats kind of critical as Europe has a very clear strategy of what it wants to see other countries commit in the current round of negotiations. I think, I was reading that day, a handbook, that the WTO gave to governments when they started the ----------- negotiations and this handbook is no longer in print because they've changed it when groups started campaigning against it. In that handbook it says, ---------- is a useful tool for governments because they can overcome domestic resistance to change because it gives legal teeth I think they need to be really clear about it precisely because there are struggles taking place everywhere against these kind of policies that companies and European governments want something of the ------ agreement because it's got legal teeth and it will in their words help to overcome domestic resistance to change.

And that's why this meeting here is very important. Thank you, for letting me be a part of it. If I've just come a European Social Forum that took place a month and a half ago in Italy and in that social forum issues around mater privatisation and around ------------- were absolutely central as well. I think there is very much a sort of international movement building, as ------- mentioned, both north and south and we need to build on that.

Nityand : I am going to be talking very briefly about two case studies, not necessarity working privatisation as we know it or as has been discussed here but which has resulted in the same kind of compacts on local communities access to water. The first story is about a factory in a place called Plachiwara, in Kerala, which falls in the Palgar district and it is in the command area of several canals and dams that were built in Kerala and the area is supposed to be very rich in water resources. As a result, over the years there has been a significant development of water intensive agriculture. The agricultural practices leave a lot to be desired but that is besides the point. The story starts about three years ago when Hindustan Coca cola, a hundred percent subsidiary of the Coca cola company, was allowed to set up a beverage manufacturing unit – that is of the soft fizzy drinks like Coca cola, sprite etc. – in Plachimara, a place chosen because of the rich groundwater available there. The factory came up in some sixty seventy acres of land right within very intensive agricultural land where paddy, sugarcane and bananas have been groom for years. When they set it up things were hush-hush for about six months until the problems come up and that when the information about the coca cola factory having even set up in Kerala came up. The company reported that it has a water requirement of 1.2 million litres a day out of which they would manifacture soft drinks and sell it out in crates to markets all over South India. We've had very poor monsoons over the last three years and Palgar does not fall on the rainward side of Kerala so it has always suffered from a little less rainfall and in the last three years, after the Coca cola factory was set up, there was a very marked and a very rapid decline in the ground water level in the surrounding areas. So farmers who would run their agricultural pumps for eight to ten hours a day were not able to run it beyond four hours because the water in the wells would disappear and they would need to wait for another four to five hours to recharge the water. They found that the Coca Cola company had dug something like ---------- wells in that area and has gone as deep as 600 ft. in search of water. Out of those sixty wells, they were reportedly relying on four ------- wells to extract all their water. This water was being used for the entire process of manufacturing beverages and it was discovered through investigating the records of another Coca Cola company elsewhere that close to sixty-five percent of the water would go as wastage. This is the water that is used to wash crates and bottles and the remainder would go into bottles that would be used for whatever purposes. Now the village rights next to the factory is a tribal village, calred Plachimara, with tribals and dalit people as it's residents and they have one community shared among a hundred and fifty households. This community was the first one to be but. They not only lost all it's water but the residue that remained after recharge, when the company stopped sucking out water tended to turn milky white and was extremely contaminated and was unfit for any kind of use, even bathing. So, as a result there has been a very strong opposition to it where the adhivashis threatened to even dismantle the company by going inside and breaking all the wells. Right now they have an ongoing strike outside the factory and this has been going on from April 22^nd, since the Earth day. The response of the state has been very weird as they have really been caught on the wrong foot. Just as Clair pointed out, once committed they seem to self on the law, when it suits them. They said that they made a commitment to that company and that they could not range on the commitment and hence they had to deliver water. Interestingly, Coca cola stopped pumping out water from the village because of public pressure and decided to deliver tanker water to the villages who were affected by it in a bid to divide opposition. The villagers, however, have refused access to the tanker water because they are under the impression that if they dependend on the tanker water, the dependency would be defined for life and they would be unable to get out of the situation and they would like to get their ground water resources back intact, the company, interestingly has gone five to six kilometres away to other farmers lands and has them between two hundred fifty rupees and four hundred rupees per tanker, that is twelve thousand litres, to purchase the water from their ground but the same water is also the water that comes from the --------------- that supplies the --------- in these villages. So the problem has been moved to an ex-MLA of that region who is supplying water to that company. The government, as I said, is already --- a very difficult situations, unable to address this because they have a contact to the company and the other problem is that once land is given to somebody there is very little one can do to regulate ground water usage and consumption. In many places in Tamil Nadu and kerala the regulatory authorities rely totally on the company's figures for water consumption and do not have any means of even examining how much water they pump out of the ground. So, that is one case I had to present from Kerala. The second one is from Madras and it is not a case of privatisation but two of the biggest known criminals in the water industry are together in Madras. One is virendi which has a very clear interest in the water business in India. Vivandi is sitting on a tuning arrangement with Metro water which is a local urban water supply company. This to provide them with information on how to reform the sector and how to deliver the services better, how to account for the water usage and water billing and everything in a better fashion. So, they are very much behind the scenes, very similar to how they entered the water market in Bangalore where they were sitting in a very enormous constancy position and seemingly without a point of view. Vivendi is a very large multinational corporation with interest in everything from the entertainment sector to information technology to water. Vivendi has another our called ONIX. An ONIX environmental services is one of the larger waste management companies. They provide total solutions for solid waste management, hazardous waste management, bio-medical waste management, sewage treatment and they deal with anything that comes out of the backside of companies or of societies. Onix is the subsidiary of vivendi it has a contract for collecting and disposing 3000 tonnes of municipal waste from Madras. Vivendi, on the other hand, is sitting inside the Metro water with an eye on the water market in Madra which is claimed to be one of the richest water markets, some obscene amount of money changes lands just in the summer through tanker lovies, water sachets and the local private operators. So Madras market is very incrative for all water business. So, white vivendi is waiting on the sideling for the water sector to open up, Onix company takes 3000 tonnes of garbage and dumps it in one of the last first water eco-systems in Madras. It's a swamp land called Pallijamai, which has been identified historically as one of the most critical recharge zone for all the ----------------- in South Madras. Onix deans South Madras and dumps in the freshwater and the same persons through the ground water ------- go back to south Madras and the observation that both vivendi and Metro water and various other governments have made is that among various reasons for privatisation, on of the most important ones is the lack of freshwater resources. In what freshwater resources we have in Madras, we've dumping our garbage in and there is also a thirty-year old sewage treatment plant that discharges – it has not been working for the last twenty years – untreated waste into the freshwater resources of Madras. So, the stories speak for themselves. In one case, we have a company that thinks trashing water is actually a good business because it makes business for one of it's subsidiaries and in another case we have water going into wasteful consumption, into wasteful purposes, into luxury products that has nothing to do with life as such, damaging the rights of communities that have been living over there and denying even the basic rights of drinking water.

Uma Shankari : We are joined together to bring out something like a citizens report on the overview of water sector in Andhra Pradesh and we are gathered together in a group called Neethi Samakhya (Neethi means water, Samakhya means collector) and we tried to bring out a very short book so that every person can read the whole of it, that is why the book is kept at fifty to sixty pages and it deals with a lot of issues, not so much data based but more about various issues and options. Some of the highlights that I would like to bring out here, is that, in Andhra Pradesh and in toehr states as well, water allocation between different regions have been highly discriminatory. The Telengana region has suffered a lot in water allocation. That is one of the most important plans of the movement and especially the main grievance has been that while the Krishna and Godavari rivers are flowing – most of the catchment area and the flowing area is in Telengava – the benefits mostly have gone to the coasted areas. That is one of the highlights of this book and there are other things like how the performances of the irrigation projects is sub optimal in Andhra Pradesh. The other contributors to the book include our senior associate Vijendra Shri Ramchandra and a few others. I suppose people will find the book useful. We opened a forum called forum against privatisation of water which was floated in Hyderabad. Some of the people here – Ramchandra and Jaswin who took an active part in it. This forum was floated because there was a lot of anxiety in the minds of the people here after the electricity privatisation and an attempt to privatise transport sector in a bigger way. There has been major protests against this and in anticipation of water privatisation and setting up water regulatory mechanism, people got together, especially the left parties and also many people's organisations as well as NGOs, very actively campaigned against privatisation – it has been covered widely in the press – and it seems that the whole process, to some extent, has been stalled. We hope that we will continue to oppose this vigorously. In Patpali, which is just outside of Hyderabad, there some understanding seems to have been reached. But actually, the problem is that we don't have information in these sort of things. As soon as you ask the government they out-rightly lie. This keeps on happening till you dig the information and tell them about it. So a lot of under-the-table negotiations seem to happen but we hope that they will not succeed and we hope to intensify the opposition. The other aspect of privatisation is private battling, Kinley has set up in at least two places, Satupalhi in Khammaon district and one in Medar district. One is near Patanchaul, an extremely dry place and already with the problem of water pollution, including underground water pollution. We hope to have some reports on these also.

Lataji : All this time we were talking about what had already happened and we are concerned about globalisation and privatisation of water in advanced stages. But I think, as far as Kerela is concerned, we have a very important event that is taking place on the 18^th and the 19^th of January, that is the global industrialists meet and where the government is inviting a lot of private companies, both multinationals as well as within the country for investing in almost eighty three projects which are expected. The investment requires more that rupees thirty one thousand crores and the government roughly estimates that the GIM, the projects worth rupees four thousand eight hundred crores will be favourably available and, as it was in the case of Chhatisgarg. The Price Water house coopers, is also the consultant of these projects.

In this background, I would like to present two case studies in Kerela which are the proposed privatisation of water bodies. One is the Kochi industrial water supply project in the river Periyar, the biggest river in Kerela. Periyar has sixteen hydro elective dams and one irrigation dam and it also has a hundred year old dam and we already know how the water is being diverted for different proposes over the last fifty years. At least six major industries and thousand small industrial units, utilising presently three hundred to three hundred and fifty million litres of water per day, from Periyar, they take the water from the Periyr and directly discharge the waste into the river. Green peace has already identified this river as a global toxic hotspot and this is the background of the Periyar river. The ------------ ingressed into the river is very high and it goes up by 1000 paper during the summer months as the large Kochin corporation depends entirely on this river for it's drinking water requirements. Coming to the project the Kerela State industrial development corporation and the Kerala water authority have jointly prepared the Kochi industrial water supply project and the proposal is to sell at least two hundred to two hundred and fifty million litres of water per day, to the industries as well as other important establishments, that is mostly industrial establishments, in the Kochi -------------- belt, and the investment they have proposed is three hundred and thirty crores and it is proposed that the project will be completed in 2005 and it understood that three companies – Mahindra and Mahindra Infrastructure Develop Limited, Mumbai; the construction Industry Development Board, Malaysia; Subash Projects Marketing ---------------, Bangalore – are on the run for obtaining the project in the GIM and the State government is playing games through the press telling that the KCDC has no --------expression of interest. They still claim that only the expression of interest is there for the scheme – and, as is in other cases, by own operation transfer basis project – and according to the government source, the area already has surplus water and the withdrawal of the water for the company would only be 2.5 percent of the river flow and that adequate water will be available for this project. The latest development is that the company is aiming to achieve a project of rupees one hundred and forty crores per annum but the company will only pay rupees 17.3 crore per annum to the government and the contract is for twenty years. At the same time, the industries have refused to take water from the company because they will hae to pay fifteen rupees per thousand litres because the company is already extracting water using their own pumps and the water authorities also come to their defence. So the company feels that purchasing water from this new company would not be profitable for them but still the government is bent on proceeding with the contract. I hope you understand the point. So, if the industries are refusing but at the same time the project is implemented, the water authorities will be forced to take up the project and the government are indirectly the consumers. The Cochin co-orporation will have to pay the cost of the project. And it is believed that the fidders have asked for a time of two more months so that the negotiation can be made. They want to ------ the industries because this project has been proposed mainly to supply water to the industrial belt of Cochin. The actual scenario is that the river does not have enough water for industrial use. As early as 1989 there were a lot of studies showing that this river does not have enough water for even industrial use because, fold you before, here are more than thousand industries depending on this river already. The river is, now, running short of water and for the pollution to be abated it needs 17 million cubic metres of water per second to flow through the river. What about the 250 million litres of water which has to be extracted? What would be the impact? So, what has not been done up to now, through the government is going ahead is, one is that while the privatisation efforts have been started in a very hurried and secretive manner they are not backed by proper scientific studies on water availability on the feasibility studies of the upstream and downstream impact on the river. The second thing is that, the impact of this new project on the existing water supply schemes, on the existing pollution due to industries, the frequently occurring fish deaths in this river was already there, the present and the future water supply schemes, the heavy saline ingress, the impact on the agriculture and the traditional fishing communities, all this has not been estimated but the government is going ahead with this plan. The opinion of local MLAs, on the panchayats, or the farmers, or the fisherfolk, or the public who depend upon this river – there are at least eighty panchayats depending upon this river – they are claiming indirectly, is not being sought. But the government claims that the groundwork for this project started six years back. The public has said through the press that the government should publicise all this documents, including, the detailed public report, the terms and conditions of the contract and the detailed EIAs has to be conducted through this is part of the KSIDC – and a public hearing has to be conducted. Another thing is that the proposed drinking water scheme has not been even kept at the Kerela assembly's subject matter committee. And the second one is the Malampura irrigation scheme where, for the first time, the water from the reservoir is going to be sold to a private company – and we've all been talking about Vivendi – and the proposed is to sell the water to Vivendi. A brief profile of Malampura irrigation scheme is that it is one of the earliest projects of Kerela and it is the most important tributory of the Bharatapura, another one of the larger rivers in Kerela dna the important thing is that it was commissioned to irrigate two crops of paddy but not what is happening is that it is already supplying drinking watr to the Palakad municipality that is the entire township and ------------- and the Pepsi company situated near Kongikode, also takes water from the same reservoir on a daily basis i.e. 1.73 lac litres of water every day and two other companies also take water from this reservoir, which was proposed as an irrigation dam, and the government has made a foreign investment based on 25 lac rupees advertisement in the American media and Vivendi has already submitted the tender for this project and is estimated to be 40 crore rupees and the company proposes to take the water through pipelines to the factory area. The actual scenario is that if the Malampura reservoir water is handed out to a private company, or it is a DOT contract, it will spell the death of one of the most important and one of the most fertile rice tracks of Kerela state, spelling the death of over 20,000 hectares of rice lands because the dam now presently irrigates 20,000 hectares of these crop paddy lands. And presently there is a lot of water shortage because water is released for just sixty days and the farmers have been paying tax since the dam has been built for the last fifty years and they have already paid more than double the cost of the dam and now they are forced to sell the water without their consent or knowledge. And, when the farmers have already paid double the cost of the dam the government has no right to sell the water without the farmers consent and knowledge. I would like to quote that irrigation rights of farmers are involved over here and the second thing is, instead of going for a comprehensive approach to water resource management this dam is being used for diverse purposes irrigation, industries and drinking purpose – the gross violation of peoples rights is an issue that's been taken up – it is not based on proper studies like the present status of the dam, the situation of the dam, the water shortage problem, the present method of water distribution, the flow of water in the catchment which is already very degraded and this will all, in true, lead to disastrous consequences for the farming community.

Bhawani Shankaran : In the talk made by Shripad, he said the present business as usual is not satisfactory. You know, our government's management is inefficient and there are people there with a mercenary attitude who only look to thir salaries and not people oriented work. He said it was unsatisfactory, we have to change. Also, at the other end, privatisation, as we have heard, is not good. What is it that we want to privatise? We should not privatise the ownership. The sovereignty of water should be with the government or the people themselves. Privatisation should only be for the services. For know, for example, the research and development, the progress in technology is very much lagging in the government side. The government doesn't do anything. It has to learn from the other sectors. So, if at all any privatisation should be there, it should be for the services rendered but water must be free. It is native's gift to us. It is only the transportation or ------------------, that service the government should enter and then again distribute back to the people and the people should deal with the government and not at all with the private people. The private people are just contracts. I don't know how to construct a building, I am not a mason or a carpenter but I use their services to construct a building. That is the only way privatisation should be done. I think that should be the strategy then people can get whatever they want, ----------- subsidisation can be there and the poor people can be taken care of. So, the strategy should be developed this way and so far as hydroelectricity is concerned, I don't think it is the first time this has been done. We have in Bombay, Bombay hydroelectric supply undertaking of the Tatas which is working very well. If it is an Indian company then it is doing quite well. So, there should be a regulation; there should be control and dealing should not be direct. it should be through the government so the government can act regulatory and all that. So far as what I heard, all the privatisation that can be done are defective.

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Courtesy: Sienepuu foundation http://www.siemenpuu.org and Coalition for Environment and Development

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