Mr Nair made his comments on Bloomberg TV’s weekly environmental show, A Greener Asia, on 15 March in Hong Kong. He contrasted urban India and China in discussing the lack of reliable access to clean water in Asia and the urgent need to fix this pressing problem.

The World Health Organisation estimates that one billion people around the world lack reliable access to clean water and blames contaminated water for causing disease and death.

WaterAid, a UK-based non-profit group that works to help people escape the poverty and disease caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation, estimates conservatively that more than 170 million Indians have no access to safe water.
Mr Nair told show host Bernard Lo that between 70 and 90 per cent of rivers running through cities in the world’s two most populous nations are “grossly polluted”.

Industrial pollution is serious, “but the basic problem often not talked about is that of human sewage and domestic waste contaminating water sources”, he said.

This is especially so in India, where – as Lo said – many people characterise urban rivers as open sewers. Mr Nair suggested this is because there has been a breakdown and failure of institutions that provide basic sanitation, adding, “I’m surprised there is no uproar. The middle-class has taken the situation for granted. People need to get angry”.

Asked if he thought Indians accept the conditions as the price of progress, Mr Nair said: “This is a very complex issue, but there is almost a cultural acceptance of decay of urban infrastructure. India has the technical expertise to resolve these issues, but it doesn’t seem to have the political will.” [1]

He contrasted this with China, which had for the past 15 years shown how it has the “ability to mobilise politically and say, ‘we’ll fix that’”, to which Lo commented, “Sometimes not having to deal with democracy gets things done”.

India has two major issues to deal with, Mr Nair said: the first is with water scarcity – a problem it shares with China but which can be solved by ensuring the supply is clean before it is made available for use; and the second with waste water – and the answer here is to treat it effectively before re-releasing it to keep it from fouling fresh supplies and water that is being reused.

“These are two spectrums which don’t seem to be tackled in India at the moment,” Mr Nair said. “It would not be unfair to say the infrastructure breakdown both for water supply for industrial use and the treatment of waste water is widespread, a national problem that needs to be dealt with with great urgency.”

For China’s part, more than 100 of the country’s 660 cities face extreme water shortages and at least 70 per cent of its lakes and rivers are polluted.
Lo suggested that while the problems are not as obvious in cities such as Beijing – which has a clear interest as the host for the 2008 summer Olympic Games to be seen in the right light – beyond such high-profile cities water crises are covered up.

Mr Nair said: “My feeling is that the Chinese are not trying to cover up. If you look at what happened at the [National People’s] Congress recently [2], the government is one of the few that has openly stated at the highest level that sustainable development is at the core of its economic progress.

“The problem I think we all need to understand in India and China is that the scale of socio-economic transformation taking place is unprecedented in human history. They have huge problems and they are all dealing with these, but I think China is confronting them more head-on than India.”

The Global Institute For Tomorrow is an independent social venture think tank dedicated to advancing understanding of the impacts of globalisation.