In its guidelines for drinking-water quality, the World Health Organization says that access to safe potable water is “essential to health, a basic human right and a component of effective policy for health protection”. In Guyana, for at least three decades now, the supply of potable water has left much to be desired, and the two main challenges facing the GWI are the reduction in the number of unserved areas, and the transmission of drinkable water to all areas currently served.
Budgetary allocations for water and sanitation have increased significantly over the years with $1.5B being spent on water in 2015 and $4B being set aside this year. Yet, the proportion of citizens with access to adequate and safe drinking water has not increased significantly.
The piped water supply system in this country is deficient, and to the frustration of many taxpayers, unacceptable; a majority of citizens now procure purified drinking water from sources considered much safer than the public supply delivered by the GWI.
Across communities in this country, public confidence in the supply of drinking water has eroded considerably under successive governments, not only due to advisories from the government or health based organizations urging that tap water be boiled before consuming, but due to the evidence of their own eyes – from discoloration, to the considerable residue on settling, and on occasions, concerns relating to the odour emanating from the water. In Guyana there is now a large body of our citizens who have grown into adulthood who have never used the water flowing through our taps for drinking purposes.
This state of affairs must be considered unacceptable in this the twenty-first century, a time of booming technological innovation and advancement worldwide. Every day/week/month, hundreds, possibly thousands, of Guyanese spend a portion of their income acquiring purified water for drinking purposes from commercial suppliers of pure water both in bulk as well as in the form of the popular bottled water sold in supermarkets and shops throughout the country. Piped water from the GWI is usually utilised mainly for cleaning purposes in the more affluent households in Georgetown and around the country, and only in the poorer communities is there still a reliance on the GWI piped water system for general uses including cooking and drinking.
Despite this reliance in the poorer communities, as at October 2015, citizens residing in North Sophia have had no access to piped water for over 30 years; and over in Barnwell North, East Bank Demerara, there has been no access for 15 years. Clearly these communities were not considered priority areas for development in the sector, and together they represent the failure to deliver safe, adequate and affordable water to our communities. This, even as coverage levels for potable piped water remain critically low in a number of areas.
Over the years, taxpayers and donor agencies have funded a number of capital investment projects for the water and sanitation sector, but progress has been painfully slow. Moreover, the challenges with the supply and the quality, indicate that the lack of safe drinking water is one of the most difficult infrastructural problems we are facing.
Shortly after the David Granger-led administration took office, GWI unveiled a number of completed projects, which had targeted unserved areas on the East Bank Demerara, resulting in a flurry of activity and positive press. In fact, new Chief Executive Officer, Dr Richard Van West-Charles was constantly reassuring citizens of improved services while pointing to an expansion in distribution networks and treatment plants, among other infrastructural development works.
These attempts to build confidence in the system are fine, except that the increase in public expenditure in the sector must be backed up by increased capacity at the local government level, improved organizational efficiency and the responsiveness of the authority to its customers, in addition to lowering production costs using better technology.
Recently, the Ministry of Finance announced a $16 billion grant from the United Kingdom for major infrastructural programmes including water supply improvement. This funding must be supported by a policy that is more protective of public health, and reflects the recognition that safe drinkable piped water is a basic human right, not that GWI is looking to simply increase its transmission of water without considering the safety and purity of all the water it distributes to households and communities.
Therefore, as a matter of priority, GWI and this government must ensure that the public piped water system delivers adequate quantities of safe drinking water, and not as obtains in many areas at the moment, water of dubious quality. It is not acceptable that residents at Mahdia and other interior locations have limited or no access to a potable water system and similarly, it is not acceptable that residents at Sophia or Barnwell North had to endure a wait of 30 and 15 years respectively before they could turn on a tap in their community and see clean flowing water.
Indeed, the challenges remain with citizens whose cultural attitudes towards being charged for piped water result in losses to the company because they refuse to pay for it. These are issues GWI must face as it expands its metered programme.
If it is that GWI and the government are incapable of supplying safe potable water to communities and households, resulting in a burgeoning commercial bottled pure water supply sector, how can they be relied on to monitor and control the quality and safety of the water supplied by commercial suppliers? The bottled water industry has seen rapid growth in a relatively short period, and we are uncertain as to the level of regulation and monitoring that is applied to this relatively new sector.
The government’s own commitment to a greener Guyana requires that attention be paid to the industry because the bottles themselves become a landfill environmental disaster. Frankly, successive governments have abdicated their state oversight responsibilities of the bottled water industry.
Ironically, GWI had proposed starting its own bottled water business and at the time of the announcement in 2008, then CEO Karran Singh had said that many of the water businesses were applying cheap filtration methods to GWI’s tap water and passing this off as better quality water. GWI’s water bottling plant had been established at Pouderoyen and its entry into the commercial side of the sector seemed imminent at the time.
Since then, GWI seems to have abandoned this investment and instead, is focused on improving its public supply. Since water is a public good, GWI and the government cannot reasonably believe that tariffs will yield profits. Accordingly, efforts to improve cost recovery must take into consideration the socio-economic status of targeted communities, the benefits of increased access to poor communities and the overall public health of all citizens. Given water’s impact on health, productivity and quality of life, this is an imperative that must be pursued with gusto.
Improving its treatment and distribution systems to ensure the delivery of safe potable water should be the focus of the GWI as a matter of urgency. This must be followed by an expansion in the supply and distribution of safe potable water to the unserved areas. Simultaneously, standards must be set and implemented to ensure that commercial water suppliers do not get away with simply re-distributing the piped water of the GWI disguised as purified water as the GWI itself had posited in 2008.
