Poor pay more to get sufficient clean water
By T. Sima Gunawan
ISTANBUL, Turkey (JP): Poor people in Jakarta and other big cities of developing countries have to pay between 10 and 20 times more to get safe water as they do not have access to subsidized piped water, the World Bank stated here yesterday.
Ismail Serageldin, World Bank Vice President for Environmentally Sustainable Development, told a discussion on Water for Thirsty Cities that 32 percent of Jakarta's population have to buy clean water from vendors because the government can only provide piped water to 14 percent of the population. The other 54 percent of the population get water from tapped wells.
The discussion was held in conjunction with the UN Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II), which will end on June 14.
Some 220 million poor urban people in developing countries do not have access to safe water and an estimated 420 million have no access to basic sanitation services. By 2010 the urban population is estimated to reach 4 billion, with 1.4 billion having no access to basic services.
Serageldin said that 8 percent of Singapore's potable water is wasted because of pipe leakages, but in many cities of other countries 40 percent to 60 percent of potable water is wasted.
Fifty-seven percent of Jakarta's water is wasted. Other cities with high rates of wasted piped water include Dhaka (62 percent), Manila (58 percent) and Seoul (42 percent).
Due to the lack of clean water, many urban poor drink contaminated water. It is estimated that the costs of impaired health from unsafe drinking water in Jakarta reaches US$300 million a year.
"Many cities could see illness drop by 30 percent, with productivity rising accordingly, if the poor could be supplied with uncontaminated water," Serageldin said.
The lack of clean water, particulate air pollution, and lead are three major problems in the growing crisis of an urban environment that inflict billions of losses in developing countries.
In Jakarta, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur the annual costs from dust and lead pollution are estimated at $5 billion, or about 10 percent of the cities' combined incomes, Caoio Koch-Weser, managing director of the World Bank, said earlier this week in the plenary address at the UN Conference on Human Settlements.
"That is the accumulative number for the three cities, but I don't have the specific number for Jakarta," he said on Tuesday.
Environmental cleanup is one of the three interrelated priorities of public policies to deal with urban development problems. The other two are urban finance and poverty reduction.
Koch-Weser said that increased reliance on the private sector and local initiative is the only way that vast investment needs of the developing world's cities and towns can be met.
"It is already happening in the fastest growing areas of Asia and Latin America, with many cities privatizing or contracting out of the private sector service such as power, water, garbage collection and transportation," he said.
In poverty reduction, he said, the governments should respect the rights of the poor to live and work in the city.
"The government should stop using the bulldozer and forced evictions as policy instruments," he said.
Building codes and regulations should encourage innovation and low-cost approaches and provide the poor with access to property rights, he added.
The Kampong Improvement Program, which started in Jakarta, has improved the living conditions of 15 million people over a 25-year period, he said.
In Jakarta, however, some of the kampongs have been demolished.
Koch-Weser said that the World Bank is ready to do more urban projects in Indonesia other than the Kampong Improvement Program, but he emphasized that the loans must be used properly.
"We have very stringent conditions to our loans and to make sure that they are properly used," he said.
Since 1972, the World Bank has invested in $25 billion in more than 5,000 cities and towns. It plans to lend an additional $15 billion for urban projects for the next five years.