The report by Navdanya and Research Foundation for Science, Technology & Ecology is in two parts. The first part lists the World Bank projects in three categories – loans given from 1950-1990, water restructuring projects from 1990-2005, and projects at approval stage. The second part of the report includes case studies of World Bank driven water privatization projects in Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
The case studies reveal a pattern -
- Firstly, the World Bank is using its loans as conditionality for privatisation.
- Secondly, it is reducing the universal access system of public utilities to a privileged access to industry and 24x7 supply for rich urban areas.
- Thirdly, it is diverting limited and scarce ground water from rural areas to urban areas, thus undermining the Millennium Development Goal(s) to reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water”.
- Fourthly, the World Bank is forcing governments and public utilities to increase water tariffs, and to commodify water, undermining people’s fundamental right to water as part of the right to life.
- Fifthly, since its projects are based on non-sustainable water use, World Bank projects are failing as is clear in the case of the Sonia Vihar plant in Delhi and the Veeranam project in Tamil Nadu. World Bank loans are failing to bring water to people. They are successful only in guaranteeing contracts and profits for water corporations like Suez, Vivendi, Bechtel.
World Bank loan conditionalities have many paradigm shifts built into them – the shift from “water for life” to “water for profits”, the shift from “water democracy” to “water apartheid”, from “some for all” to “all for some”. As the debate on privatisation has intensified, the semantics of privatization has changed, but the processes of privatization unfold unheeded.
“Privatization” was launched as a core of the globalization and trade liberalisation paradigm, based on the crude ideology that public is bad, private is good, domestic is bad, multinational is good. As movements emerged against water privatisation, the World Bank rhetoric shifted to “private sector participation” and an attempt was made to define privatization of services and management contracts as not being privatisation.
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