Why the Turtle May not Catch the Hare in Asia's Race for Adequate Infrastructure

China celebrates its Lunar New Year this Sunday (14 February, 2010) with the largest human migration in the contemporary world. Today, its citizens will use many of the 42 high-speed train lines that will be open by 2012. These trains have average speeds as high as 215 miles per hour. Tickets cost the equivalent of one-to-three weeks of labor for an assembly line worker. China's budget for railroad construction in 2009 was $88 billion.

Take a look across the Himalayas to India (the photo is of Chandigarh's Sukna Lake facing the Himalayas) and the infrastructure scenario couldn't be more different. I'm struck by the New Delhi government's anemic investment in a crucial type of infrastructure: water delivery. According to Dr. Sudhirendar Sharma, Delhi's public water utility (the Delhi Jal Board) spends a meager $125 million per year on water delivery. Despite collecting user fees for access to running water, the board recovers only about $48 million per year. The Delhi Development Report 2006 notes that although 75 percent of Delhi's households have access to tap water, nearly 27 percent receive less than three hours of tap water each day. [Incidentally, that figure includes my current home.] To be fair, Delhites do receive more water, on average, than residents in other major cities from Mumbai to Paris. China still outperforms India in providing broader access to water, with 89 percent of urban households able to access tap water according to their Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

What's going on in India? Here's some simple math from CSIS's summary of the Delhi Development Report (2006): New Delhi demands about 3,600 million liters of water per day. The Delhi Jal Board provides 3,040 million liters per day. So Delhi should meet 84% of demand. After leaky pipes and strategic diversions, only 1,730 out of 3,040 million liters – 57 percent – reaches Delhi's paying customers. So Delhi meets 48 percent of its demand for water. With groundwater levels sinking 130 feet below the ground in parts of Delhi, 75 percent of Delhi's drinking water comes from the Yamuna River. The NGO “We for Yamuna” claims Delhi treats only five percent of the 950 million gallons of sewage it dumps in the Yamuna. [By the way, yes I have ventured into this river...see the photo below of one ox-driven trip I took across the Yamuna in Khotana, Uttar Pradesh (Musharaff's birthplace) to investigate land disputes.]

What is going wrong? Delhi's rapidly-growing population certainly strains the bounds of the possible. In the coming year, Delhi's population will grow from 16 million to over 19 million people. The lack of cooperation amongst state governments – who each control various portions of the Ganga River basin - magnifies natural resources' limitations (see the 2004 Punjab Termination of Agreements Bill that ends all water-sharing commitments with Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, and Rajasthan). Ongoing efforts to divert “surplus water” from eastern India to the west and south are seen as prone to failure. Take the Inter-Linking of Rivers (ILR) mega-project that costs $123 billion and should be completed by 2016. Although the President and Supreme Court of India support this initiative, experts on water management and development critique the project's "unrivaled grandiosity". Environmentalists argue there is no true "surplus water" to be re-routed and the project would cause massive displacement of at least 583,000 people in only half of the project's geographic coverage (peninsular India). In addition, the ILR project's budget and scale of action is far beyond India's prior experience: the ILR would move four times more water than China's Three Gorges Dam, five times more water than all of the US's inter-basin transfers, and six times more water than India's current inter-basin transfers. The ILR will cost more than sum total of Colonial and Independent India's irrigation investments from 1830 until now (see the preceding link to Shah, Amarasinghe, and McCornick). Add in consideration of the (much-debated) Himalayan glaciers' retreat and the picture looks gloomy indeed.

In my humble opinion, the root of Delhi's problem is inequality (See the photo of the wedding procession in front of my home last week. Yes, the Rajasthani groom is riding a white horse).

I don't mean to minimize the environmental pressures caused by migration and politics. Given these constraints, the easiest solution to Delhi's water woes would be to recover the losses caused by leakages and theft along the city's 9,000 km water distribution system. The Delhi Jal Board is considering two solutions: raising water tariffs and/or privatizing water supply, which will also increase the price of water. Increasing user fees certainly seems necessary. However, making access to water conditional on the ability to pay is inhumane if rates exceed poor households' budgets. Additionally, these solutions ignore the lack infrastructure for water delivery across the 1,600 unauthorized colonies and 1,100 slums in Delhi. Infrastructure is only becoming more problematic in new suburban neighborhoods such as Dwarka that were built without any consideration of water supplies. Why should theft of water to meet the demand of these under-supplied and non-supplied areas surprise us? How unpredictable is leakage of water pipes in Delhi's neighborhoods reeling amidst population surges?

Without equitable planning that extends and maintains water infrastructure across hyper-poor and hyper-wealthy Delhi, development will be slow on every level. India would do well to study China's extensive investments in improving access to water – such as the $1.35 billion spent to expand rural China's supply in 1991-1995. Regardless of the extent of water delivery infrastructure, water quality remains extremely low in both India and China.

Today, the joint problems of contaminated drinking water and sanitation are the second greatest cause of infant mortality (UNDP 2006, c.f. CSIS). New Delhi will loose some of its brightest minds before it even knows them simply by ignoring poor citizens' growing exclusion from systems that deliver clean water.