'Increased salinity is not just impacting human usage but also economic development'

People's access to drinking water and sanitation has been shrinking, particularly in the over-populated and underprivileged localities in Bangladesh due to pollution, depleting groundwater, neglected sanitation and lack of a proper resource management system. 

To learn about its causes and the best practices to tackle this, The Business Standard spoke to Amaka Godfrey, Executive Director of International Programmes and Global Lead for Programmes of WaterAid, who recently visited Bangladesh. 

Based in Nairobi, Amaka is a specialist in the field of sanitation, hygiene and water supply with over 25 years of experience. Having worked in more than ten countries, she possesses strong technical knowledge and has vast experience working in both rural and urban areas. 

Before joining WaterAid, Godfrey led the development of the African Sanitation Policy Guidelines (ASPG) for the African Ministers Council on Water. Prior to working as a Consultant, she also worked as a researcher and lecturer at the Water, Engineering and Development Centre of Loughborough University (UK).

Why is access to safe water and sanitation considered a human right? 

Every human being needs to drink water for survival every day and the water must also come out of the body. From this angle, access to water and sanitation is considered a basic human right. The UN Human Rights Commission has also recognised it as a basic human right across the globe. 

There are various levels of legal connotations to the human right to water, sanitation and hygiene, or in short, WASH. The universal human right to WASH means every single human being is entitled to have clean water and have some way to use sanitation facilities. The need for WASH makes us different from other lower animals because they don't need such facilities. 

However, this does not hold governments accountable for providing people with human rights, apart from the countries which made it a part of their constitutions. And in those constitutions, the government must have a minimum standard of those facilities provided for every single citizen or national of the country. That is really complicated, because universal access to human rights does not mean only having the right to water and sanitation if you are a citizen of a country. As long as you are a human being, you should be entitled to access at least to drink, to cook, to wash, and to have sanitation facilities.

In terms of access to safe drinking water and water rights in the Global South, what are the major failures of concerned authorities in providing it's people with water? 

Water is a social good because every human being should have access to water. At the same time, it is an economic good and is quite a labour-intensive utility. The supply of water requires institutions, capital investments and maintenance costs. Moreover, the climate's impact has complicated the matter. 

Still, water and sanitation are not often discussed as political points. These are not like roads and electricity, but something every human needs. In many countries, there is no designated authority or a single in-charge of water and sanitation. You might see individual ministries for infrastructure, health and other sectors share the responsibility for water, but no one is really accountable. Sanitation is even worse. 

In Africa, there is a saying 'when a goat is owned by so many owners, the goat dies quickly'. Governments should designate a single authority with specific budgetary allocations and regulations supported by necessary policies and strategies. 

For example, telecommunication service is provided by the private sector while governments only formulate guidelines for them in many countries. On the other hand, you don't find such systems for water supply, which is considered informal. And yet it requires capital investment the governments often don't have. 

Given a designated authority, the government can act as a facilitator, enabling people (likely the private sector) who are capable of delivering the services to people. Since water is not like telecommunication, the authority must regulate and monitor the pricing so that everybody can afford it. However, ensuring an economic good for social use seems a big challenge across developing countries and even in some parts of Europe. 

According to a World Bank study, the groundwater of Bangladesh is exposed to high risk of elevated arsenic, salinity and groundwater depletion hazards. What should be the risk management approach in terms of sustainable use of water? 

Bangladesh is a good example for many countries (dependent on groundwater) in terms of risk management of groundwater. 

Here, both the government and the people are aware of the threats to groundwater. It is now crucial to engage those people who can better manage the water resources in Bangladesh. Over-abstraction of groundwater is already drawing high metals. The government should really be serious and clear about water resources management. By having a water resources management strategy and policy in place, people can determine the safe limit of water for abstraction. Water supply usage priority should be given to human consumption before economic development strategies on agriculture and industrial use.

Therefore, regulation should be given importance. Any water we extract has to go out somewhere and when it goes out, it's not the same quality. Without regulation, you will continue to add even more contamination to the groundwater. So industrial waste, human waste and all of that are all coming back and with the climate change happening, the threat is even greater for Bangladesh. 

Because of the over-abstraction of groundwater, more seawater is going into the ground, even in places which did not previously have saline in the groundwater. This will continue to increase and seawater will come in closer contact with humans. 

With time it will become quite difficult to get fresh water to supply for human consumption and even for industrial use. Water with high salinity requires different kinds of treatment. Factory machines made of metal can take in salt and get damaged. So, increased salinity is not just impacting human usage but also economic development. 

It is obvious that most governments act when something impacts the economy, as soon as it impacts foreign exchange and GDP, the government listens.  

Is putting a price on water justifiable? If yes, what should be the standard of pricing, particularly in a poverty-prone society? 

As an economic good, water doesn't come free of cost. Especially in a country like Bangladesh, producing quality water for human consumption will cost more. If there is no tariff system, people consuming more water will benefit more than those who struggle to afford it. Therefore, a tariff is really important and not only for developing or managing water resources. 

Having said that, the tariff needs to be fixed considering the economic standards of various people. The rich should not pay the same as somebody living in a slum. That's not fair. 

Basically, the people who use more water should pay for much more because they can afford to pay. Therefore, the poor should pay less and the deficit needs to be subsidised with the money that comes from the rich. 

Why do I say that? People in the slums can collect water one or two times a day and they don't even have space to store the water. All they need is a little basic water to drink, wash their clothes and cook. 

We need to appreciate the economic requirement of water and everybody should pay for it but on different tariffs.   

Amid massive campaigns during the Covid-19 period, people's hygiene practices including handwashing, improved. Now, it has reversed. What can motivate the mass population to continue hygiene practices? 

It's not just what we can do to motivate people. We need to ask ourselves why the Covid-time campaigns were successful. Remember that there was enhanced effort everywhere and facilities were provided with support. As soon as we declared an end to the pandemic, that support disappeared. The hand sanitisers went empty. The handwashing facilities lost their water supply. They were either broken or rusted within a spell of one month. 

Naturally, people forget. Habits can be formed to respond to a particular situation. There are also long-time habits that take time to change. Forming new habits and hygiene behavioural change needs continuous support. Let it become systematic that everywhere you go, there is hand sanitiser available. If I press it once or twice and there is no hand sanitiser, I won't bother the next time, because I will assume nothing is there. 

The sanitation problem is a big issue for the urban poor. What kind of intervention do they actually need? 

It's very complicated. Often, ensuring water supply is easier to do than maintaining sanitation. Sanitation is something that nobody wants to talk about or see. When it comes to intervention, everybody thinks about what facilities or infrastructures can be put in. 

Give water connection - as long as the water comes out from there, it will work. You can do that in sanitation, but it requires more interventions. The containers carrying human faeces need to be cleaned off. At the same time, human waste needs to be treated in a way that will not pollute the environment.  

Developed countries have well-connected sewerage networks. The capital investment is undertaken by the government. Moreover, houses there have septic tanks, while emptying the tanks and treating the waste are a kind of service that citizens pay for.

On the other hand, many people in developing countries even have no containers for faeces. They don't have a system for managing the waste. This is common across slums in developing countries. 

For these areas, it is important that NGOs work with the government to find shared services that work. Because, the Covid-19 pandemic reminded us that some infectious diseases spread beyond a limited boundary. 

The most important task is to contain human faeces so that it does not spread across over-populated areas like slums. There are technologies around now that look at how we can contain it in one place so that it doesn't flow to the drain. 

The next stage is how to take it out in a safe manner so that it doesn't contaminate the environment. The government needs to build the facilities, because any disease outbreak is not going to stop in the slums. It will spread to the affluent areas as well. 

In your experience as an academic what are the kinds of problems students interested in working to improve water rights/access for people should be discussing? What are the issues that are the need of the hour, that demand discourse, address and solutions?

Students of water and sanitation studies often fall under the civil engineering discipline. The civil engineering curriculum barely teaches you the social contexts and technologies applicable to challenges in water and sanitation across underprivileged localities. 

Water and sanitation are the lowest priority among the engineers because the sector does not require much money. It's not a high-profile sector either. The components used in water and sanitation are quite small in most of the standard civil engineering courses. 

In the university where I used to work, sanitation was not discussed in the context of slums. It was about building big sewerage networks and wastewater treatment plants. 

Even the students from developing countries could hardly understand the topics because there was no existence of such structures in their countries. Sometimes they questioned the relativity of learning the technologies. 

So we decided, as part of the university department, to incorporate some modules of water engineering and development agenda into the standard civil engineering studies. The customised tutorials combined all the social complexities and civil engineering challenges for the students' better understanding . 

Why did we do that? Because we wanted to attract more students to this field.