Facing ‘peak water’
By Dr Arvind Kumar
Rising prices of crude oil in the wake of fast depleting resources of fossil fuel have led experts to warn about impending ‘peak oil’ crisis but this seems small when compared to what lies ahead amid dwindling supply and growing demand for a far more basic commodity – water. About a couple of years ago, Professor Sarah Slaughter of MIT Sloan School of Management in a May 2008 paper had warned: “We once assumed that water is free, air is free and power is cheap. The latter is clearly no longer true and we are increasingly realising the truth about water.” Whereas oil prices are breaking all time records, leading many people to face budget challenges, and few have to drive to survive, while water is absolutely critical for personal and public health, which is why governments have always subsidised its cost.
It is lamentable that people in the developed world are taking free quality water for granted and consumers seldom recognise the ‘enormous expense’ to the public sector of building, maintaining and operating water systems and only directly pay ‘a fraction of the real cost of the clean drinking water’ coming out of their taps.
According to Professor Slaughter, as awareness of the vulnerability of water systems increases together with concerns over climate change, “public utilities are discussing how to restructure water rates to better reflect true costs without causing public harm.”
