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05/07/2005:

"India's Bloody Water Wars"

P. Saineth
Water, its status as a public resource as against a private asset, is one of the most explosive issues facing India in the coming years, even as the neoliberal model comes under increasing fire as a catastrophic failure for the vast majority of India's populationt. across the last decade. Privatization of water will destroy countless small farmers. It will hand over agriculture to the rich and corporations. Undeterred, the World Bank is pressing forward with its local accomplices in India's government and corporate sectors.A few weeeks ago we described the battle in northern Kerala over Coca Cola's bottling plant at Plachimada. Here P. Sainath reports on the water pirates and their raids in Maharashtra. AC/JSC

It has been happening for some time. Maharashtra is not the first State. It won't be the last. The drive towards privatisation of water in this country was planned by the World Bank in the 1990s. The just-passed Maharashtra Water Resources Regulatory Authority Bill reeks of Bank edicts already promulgated in 1998. In that year, the "The Irrigation Sector" report of the Bank (teamed up with the Indian Government) laid down the line. [Maharashtra (in western India) is a state of close to 100 million people. Mumbai with 17 million people is its capital. A lot of wealth is concentrated in this state particularly in Mumbai. Editors' note.]

It listed things that "need to be urgently put into practice." Among them: "drastically increasing and rationalising the current water rates." The rest of its "urgent needs" were the standard Bank rules for the capture of a country's farming by corporations. In pushing brutal hikes, the Bank was frank. Its report opposed gradual hikes. "The more recent experience is that `a big bang' approach may be better." Laughably, it cites Andhra Pradesh and Mexico as among the success stories of that approach.

The Latin American experience

Latin America is strewn with the corpses of economies and governments that went for the `big bang' approach. Water, especially, has been a giant factor in the rage of peoples there against regimes. This year, The New York Times ran a front-page piece on the collapse of privatised water services across Latin America. Being the Times, it coyly sidestepped any criticism of corporations. Or even of the basic concepts themselves. But it did measure the Big Bang. In Andhra Pradesh, the voters threw in a bang of their own last May . You'd think we'd learn something from all this. [Editors' note: Andhra Pradesh is a southern Indian state close to 80 million people, which the NYT correctly described (at that time) as the darling of western governments and corporations. A year ago the voters there threw out the World Bank's posterboy chief minister, Naidu, entirely against the fervent predictions of Naidu's innumerable choristers in the Indian and US press.]
Full: counterpunch.org