Mercado: Comparison as tutor
Saturday, September 4, 2010
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SO, what has Phnom Penh of Cambodia got that Cebu City never bagged? A world-class water agency, reply 2,600 scientists.
Today, these experts from 210 agencies begin the 20th World Water Week conference in Sweden. The Cambodian Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority (PPWSA) will walk away with the coveted Stockholm Industry Water Award.
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Last year, 1.6 million children from poor countries died due to disease stemming from polluted water. Nearly 300 million school days were lost. “An entire generation (was) lost to a preventable cause."
Compare the Phnom Penh agency with Metro Cebu Water District (MCWD). Population of this Cambodian capital is twice that of Cebu. Yet PPWSA has taps in nine out of ten households. And water flows 24 hours a day.
MCWD, in contrast, serves just over half of homes here. In some areas, 12-18 hours service is the rule. The rest make do with: illegal connections, individual pumps or easily-contaminated wells.
The poorest are hostaged by water vendors. “We pay more for our gastro-enteritis,” said a nun who serves slum indigents. “By how much?”
For an answer, we riffled through tables of the latest UN World Water Development Report. A squatter’s shack will pay 13 times for the same water that a home in gated Maria Luisa enclave gets, the study states.
Authority general director Ek Sonn Chan and team staunched 72 percent leakages in pipes in 1993, down to six percent by 2008.
”We’re working on reducing water loss to four percent by 2020.
That’d place us in the same league as Singapore and Tokyo.” Last time we looked, about 38 percent of MCWD water leaked away.
Bill collection ratio, in Phnom Phenh, crested at 98 percent. “Through good management
and cost-recovery practices, despite increases in electricity and other costs, the agency is entirely self-sustaining today.”
We haven’t seen the comparative MCWD data. But you don’t need a crystal bowl to make an educated guess.
“Cebu has no water problem,” former mayor Tomas Osmeña sneered.
This-world-is-flat diktat became policy. Despite a 21-year-old rain-harvesting law, Cebu didn’t build a single facility, Magsaysay Awardee Antonio Oposa noted. It handcuffed Cebu’s search for surface water beyond the city’s crumbling aquifers.
This blindness saps Osmeña’s urban development project: South Road Properties (SRP), with its 297 hectares of reclaimed land.
SRP is water- short. Osmena hired Soledad Legaspi, 80, a “water diviner.” Auditors were not amused at consultancies for psychics.
Cebu is the most desiccated of 136 Philippine cities. It siphons over double what its crumbling underground reservoirs recharge. Babies and migrants tripled demand. Water tables slumped. Saltwater seeped into aquifers eight kilometers inland, causing irreversible damage. Forests are a two percent sliver in encroached watersheds. All city rivers are biologically dead.
“When it comes to water and sanitation, (we) have short memories,” UN Human Development Report notes. London, New York and Paris are dynamic centers today because they harnessed “one of the most powerful agents for change: the separation of water from human excrement."
SRP is dwarfed by Phnom Penh’s “Camko City.” The $2.6- billion complex has complete infrastructure and 24-hour water service.
Comparison indeed remains a superb tutor.
