How apt was Adam Smith when he said that "the things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use." Smith thoughts are a fitting reminder in the context of Pakistan's water woes.
Much has been said about how water shortage is on the rise in this country, and Karachi's water problem may well be just the tip of the iceberg. According to one SDPI study, an area is considered "water stressed" when the annual water supply falls below 1,700 cubic metres per person per year. In Pakistan that number is estimated to be around 1,000 cubic metres.
Years of flawed water pricing aimed at appeasing voters have led to eroding infrastructure, creating wastages along the way. A flawed policy also means that households and businesses use the resource carefree, with little or zero interest by the state and the society to invest in water investment technology.
This column wants to ask its readers how would they feel if they bought a can of water and used it the same way they use water from the ground pipe. The British knew it better. Even it before the partition, British housing colonies in the sub-continent had water meters installed in each house. After the partition, their Pakistani successors did away with effective pricing, as if water is going to last forever and the water infrastructure doesn't need to be upgraded. Do we think that water grows on trees?
The problems stemming from insufficient access and poor quality of water resources take several forms. At the one end, there are increased risks of water-related diseases such as diarrhoea, hepatitis, dysentery, and malaria. At the other end, industrial water pollution poses direct health hazards and indirectly threatens sources of livelihood, for example for fishing communities.
Moreover, insufficient water for food production, loss of soil fertility through water-logging and salinity, decline in ground water table, unequal distribution in the irrigation system, is leading to reduced agricultural production and thus endangering food security.
Given Pakistan's water stress levels, the Jinnah Institute had rightly said last year that water crisis in Pakistan is now "at par with terrorism in terms of being an existential threat to the country's security." Yet little sense prevails, in the state and in the society.
Only today, huge quantities of water would have been sprayed mindlessly to wash cars, front yards, shop fronts, whereas another huge chunk - which some experts estimate to be roughly a third of piped water supply - would have been lost through the broken underground water pipe infrastructure.
The unfortunate bit is that water subsidies are rarely reported in this country; in fact government budgets are pretty much silent about it. However, the costs of these unchecked subsidies eventually do reflect in the under funding of maintenance and the deterioration of water infrastructure over a long course of period. But by then, much water has passed.
Increasing water storage is a must; but so is the need to bring about the right pricing. While both ends need a proper water policy in action, where one can take cues from the successful examples from Nazir Watto's Changa Pani project for the latter, the finance minister would do well do to use the opportunity this week and at least announce some broad pricing measures to improve water storage and supply infrastructure along policy nudges and right pricing to achieve efficient water consumption.