WATER MAFIAS, The 'W' company!

IIPM BBA MBA Institute: Student Notice Board

The water mafia now steals more than 50%

As darkness descends over Dharavi in Mumbai, a few local slum dwellers creep out of their shanties grasping steel ewers and plastic cans, scrambling over an iron railing fence across the railway lines to meet a crowd around a faucet in a desolate patch on the other side. The place is already burbling with an intense scuttle for water. The hitch? It’s basically the water mafia’s stolen water for sale — this particular faucet draws water from a water tank that belongs to Indian Railways! Such pilfering of water is going on for decades in our largest metropolis, as it struggles to quench the thirst of its ever growing population. Mumbai’s 19 million people demand 6,916 million litres a day; while the city’s limited capacity can provide only 2,900 million litres. The future looks really bleak as the city’s civic authority has warned that its primary water reservoirs have only 71 billion litres of water, enough only to last 200 days. It’s a wobbly situation as state government announced in December last year that water connection will not be provided to high-rise buildings until 2012. To tackle the misery, the state government is in a process to set up three new water reservoirs and a desalination plant. But these steps however, do not deal with the main problem of pilfering, because of which the city looses one-fifth of its water supply. The water mafia operating as commercial water tankers creates false scarcity to enhance their business in connivance with some Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) officials. In spite of BMC trying to curb the menace, stopping theft is easier said than done — as there is no one to monitor the fissures in the pipelines made by mafias and local leather factories for their business.

The scenario in Delhi is similar — as Delhi Jal Board (DJB) guarantees enough water for its residents — throwing open the question for the reason of scarcity, which in that case seems to be artificially created. It’s the stolen water meant for public usage that is sold back to them by the private operators. Delhi, as per official figures, has 220 litres viz. eleven buckets of water per capita per day — yet there is no accountability of 330 million gallons of water — the government says it loses 50 per cent of its water supply, but cannot explain how! After the loss, the government is left with 110 litres of water per capita per day — which is an absolute shocker!

It is a losing battle in almost every city to try and stop water mafia’s illegal extraction of water and supplying them at a soaring price. Taking out groundwater from their wells and trading it to tanker owners for Rs.100/ per load is a full time business for farmers in the outskirts of Chennai, so much so, that they have given up their original livelihood of agriculture. Is privatisation the answer? People like Alfredo Pascual of Asian Development Bank do think that the private sector “does have a valid role to play—not as the owner of water resources but in providing the much-needed expertise.” That seems to long in coming. For now, we have a parched throat.

For more articles, Click on IIPM Article.

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2010.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
Run after passion and not money, says Arindam Chaudhuri
IIPM BBA MBA B-School: Rabindranath Tagore Peace Prize To Irom Chanu Sharmila
IIPM Prof Rajita Chaudhuri: The New Age Woman
IIPM’s Management Consulting Arm - Planman Consulting

IIPM Lucknow – News article in Economic Times and Times of India
Planman Consulting: The sister concern of IIPM
Planman Consulting
Social Networking Sites have become advertising shops

IT’S TRANSPARENCY THAT FINALLY MATTERS

Today people need and demand to be informed about and influence the process that would impact their lives. However, the challenge remains in providing authentic, relevant and comprehensible information to them

Contemporary world has become more integrated than ever before. Societal processes (political, economic & social) have emerged to be a reciprocal interplay across regions and sectors. In fact, the circularity of this interplay has broken the barrier of physical distance and hierarchy of impact. The new age institutions are now under pressure to be transparent to a wider range of stakeholders.

Around the world, NGOs have emerged as protagonists of transparency. While NGOs have exerted enormous pressure on governments, businesses and international institutions to disclose their intent, process and performance, they too have demonstrated great transparency. However, transparency in NGO sector at large has been incentivised either by funding opportunities or by regulatory coercions. The challenge remains in providing authentic, relevant and comprehensible information to the people whom the NGOs are primarily accountable to – the beneficiaries, participants, recipients, or the community members at large.

In Indian context, all registered NGOs need to furnish their annual activity and financial reports to the registration authorities and to the Ministry of Home Affairs in case of foreign funding. They are also required to submit their annual financial reports to the income tax authority for exemption of tax on the donation or grants they receive from different sources. Further, different funding agencies prescribe their own reporting requirements to the recipient NGOs. However, Indian NGOs now need to rise beyond the induced disclosure to voluntary disclosure to establish greater credibility and confidence among diverse stakeholders. For this they should undertake following measures:

Utilise annual report as a tool to demonstrate transparency: NGOs need to provide pertinent programmatic, organisational and financial information in their annual reports. The programmatic section should inform about the initiatives, target groups, major achievements, difficulties and setbacks and future plans. The organisation section should introduce the organisation, its vision and mission, board members, governance process, et al. In addition, the financial section should present the audited statement of accounts and an abridged version of financial details. Effective depiction is as important as the content. The annual report should be comprehensible and relevant for the diverse stakeholders.

Undertake social audit: Social audit denotes people’s scrutiny of an agency’s mandate, plan, action and performance based on information disclosed by the particular NGO about its various projective initiatives. In the last decade social audit has emerged as the most effective tool to empower stakeholders with transparent information and authority to scrutinise the duty bearers. While Indian NGOs have proactively advocated for social audit to ensure state accountability, many of them have not incorporated the same practice in their own domain to demonstrate their ethical standards.

Use technology to make information accessible to wider audience: In order to achieve transparency at mass level, it is very important that all stakeholders, including NGOs, corporates, donors, policy makers, researchers, et al, have the opportunity to access and exchange quality information. In this context, online options are more promising as it breaks geographic barriers to disseminate information in a more cost effective manner

Most often, NGOs, unlike other democratic institutions determine their mandate of representing and serving on behalf of people. By virtue of this self-chosen representation, voluntary disclosure becomes an ethical imperative. However, in contrary to general fallacy, transparency by itself cannot break the power structure unless a conscious devolution takes place.


For more articles, Click on IIPM Article.

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2010.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
Award Conferred To Irom Chanu Sharmila By IIPM
IIPM’s Management Consulting Arm - Planman Consulting
IIPM Lucknow – News article in Economic Times and Times of India
IIPM: Planman Stars – Event management made easy
Arindam Chaudhuri (IIPM Dean) – ‘Every human being is a diamond’
Arindam Chaudhuri – Everything is not in our hands
Planman Technologies – IT Solutions at your finger tips

Planman Consulting
Follow Arindam Chaudhuri on Twitter
Arindam Chaudhuri's Portfolio - he is at his candid best by Society Magazine
Social Networking Sites have become advertising shops