India: Calcutta plugs its deficit - What Price Water? - Cover Story

Short of money to overhaul an antiquated water system, the Indian city may have opened a pandora's box by extending the coverage of its water tax

Standing in a long, winding queue, Ratan Das eagerly awaits his turn to get a bucket of water from the public tap in Topsia slum in southern Calcutta, capital of India's West Bengal state. Das, like the 200 other people who live in the slum and are dependent on the tap, is anxious to reach it before the water stops flowing. If he misses out now, he will have to wait another four hours, sometimes even more, to get his fill.

Not far from Topsia, Meenakshi Mukherjee, a middle-class housewife living in a one-room fiat, has an array of vessels under the single water tap in her house. She needs to store as much water as possible before the pipe stops pumping out water and instead coughs out air.

Will the poor foot the bill?

The travails of Das and Mukherjee in their daily struggle for water are typical for Calcutta and its five million people. The city's antiquated distribution network, built mostly during British rule in India, has long since been unable to cope with the strains of population growth. Meanwhile, the impoverished state government has lacked the money needed to overhaul the crumbling water system. As a result, the leftist state and municipal governments are now extending their water taxes to the middle classes. Poor people fear they might be next in line to pay tax on water.

The decision to extend the water tax - which hitherto has been paid only by the rich and by commercial users - was taken by Calcutta's Marxist-dominated city government last month. The tax has been introduced underworld Bank pressure in return for loans to help refurbish the city's hydrological infrastructure.

The new tax will be applied to all buildings four or more storeys high - the kind of residential buildings popular amongst the middle class. It will in effect cover an extra 10 per cent of city residents and will hopefully raise $5 million a year, helping to plug the municipal government's $17.5 million a year water systems budget deficit. Currently, only five per cent of domestic users pay water tax. Commercial users account for 95 per cent of the annual $2.4 million now raised from the water tax.

A cutback on public taps

Meanwhile, to cut down on waste due to leakage through antiquated pipes, the government will close 600 of the 12,000 public water taps. For Calcutta's 1.2 million poor, these public taps are the only form of access to water. The cutback on taps has raised serious concern among slum and pavement dwellers. "Today I have to wait for hours to get a bucket of water. If they close the tap in my slum where shall I go?" asks Mohammed Saleem, who lives in Entally slum in east Calcutta.

The government reckons that the public's criticism of the water tax is the price it has to pay for the water system to be improved. In return for its tough tax reforms, the government hopes to get World Bank help to revamp the city's entire water and sewerage system. Currently the World Bank is undertaking a $2.5 million feasibility study for a water systems overhaul which could cost $200 million.

Hopefully, the new tax revenues will help the city improve water quality as well as quantity. "It is unsafe to drink water directly from the pipes in Calcutta," says Arindam Ghosh, a scientist at the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute. According to Ghosh, the existing water treatment plants in the city cannot remove hazardous chemicals dissolved in the water, taken directly from the heavily polluted Ganges. As a result, water-borne diseases are common.

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