Aiding Water Privatisation
Introduction
India is a land of major rivers and abundant monsoon rain in most regions is today facing a serious water crisis. Rivers are dying as their waters are dammed and diverted. Groundwater is disappearing as it is mined. And World Bank loans have had a major role in creating India’s water crisis.
The Bank has driven intensive, irrigation projects, which have wasted water, and created water logged and saline deserts. The Bank has promoted ground water mining with its tube well irrigation loans.
During the 1950’s –
1980’s the World Bank financed the creation of a
water crisis in India by financing dams and diversion
of river waters. From the 1990’s the Bank is using the
financial and hydrological crisis it created to force
Indian states and public utilities to privatize water
services and assets
Water privatization projects are a major World Bank mediated political and financial scam, locking public utilities and citizens into a system where the public pays a global corporation super high tariffs for water that belongs to us and has been provided through the services to our public utilities.
We are bringing out this report “AIDing Water Privatization” to expose the World Bank aided water privatization scam. The report is in two parts. The first part lists the World Bank projects in three categories – loans given from 1950-1990, water restructuring projects from 1990-2005, and projects at approval stage.
The second part of the report includes case studies of World Bank driven water privatization projects in Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. The case studies reveal a pattern.
Firstly, the World Bank is using its loans as conditionality for privatisation.
Secondly, it is reducing the universal access system of public utilities to a privileged access to industry and 24x7 supply for rich urban areas.
Thirdly, it is diverting limited and scarce ground water from rural areas to urban areas, thus undermining the Millennium Development Goal(s) to reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water”.
Fourthly, the World Bank is forcing governments and public utilities to increase water tariffs, and to commodify water, undermining people’s fundamental right to water as part of the right to life.
Fifthly, since its projects are based on non-sustainable water use, World Bank projects are failing as is clear in the case of the Sonia Vihar plant in Delhi and the Veeranam project in Tamil Nadu. World Bank loans are failing to bring water to people.
They are successful only in guaranteeing contracts and profits for water corporations like Suez, Vivendi, Bechtel. World Bank loan conditionalities have many paradigm shifts built into them – the shift from “water for life” to “water for profits”, the shift from “water democracy” to “water apartheid”, from “some for all” to “all for some”.
As the debate on privatisation has intensified, the semantics of privatization has changed, but the processes of privatization unfold unheeded. “Privatization” was launched as a core of the globalization and trade liberalisation paradigm, based on the crude ideology that public is bad, private is good, domestic is bad, multinational is good.
As movements emerged against water privatisation, the World Bank rhetoric shifted to “private sector participation” and an attempt was made to define privatization of services and management contracts as not being privatisation. The World Bank Director 1has stated, “Neither under the proposed project, not any advisory work is the Bank proposing privatization of nay part of Delhi Jal Board, nor is there a time table for any privatization.
As a matter of fact, at this time, the World Bank would definitely not recommend privatization. However, the World Bank loan of $ 2.5 million was used to privatize the Sonia Vihar Project to Suez Degremont, it was used to privatize the study on Delhi’s water supply to Price Water House, and it was even being used to privatize law making by global corporations by having Price Water House draft the law for a water regulatory authority, thus, by passing our elected representatives and killing democracy.
This is the privatization of water system of government. This was at the heart of the debate between the Delhi Jal Board and the Citizens Front for Water Democracy.
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