If I were in charge of water resources and land use ...

minister and his agencies to do the right thing to protect the people. I will also remind those who got concessions that they are nobody without that document and make sure they do not prevent my people from enjoying benefits from good water services under the WSIA model. I will push to implement Section 114 under WSIA to protect my state’s interests.

Water tariff for water treatment, supply and sewerage is merged and implemented transparently by SPAN. This will allow people and businesses in my state to play a proactive role in the tariff-setting process as stipulated in the WSIA model design. It is SPAN’s duty to ensure the 30-year business plan is viable. SPAN can be sued for preventing a transparent tariff-setting process.

Halt all logging activities. All water catchment areas and their supporting secondary and tertiary areas will be gazetted as permanent reserves. I will implement capital punishment for illegal logging in catchment areas as water is the lifeline for my state’s people and our economy. Any attempt to disrupt raw water security is an attempt to smother and kill my state’s future generations and their well being.

In tandem with population and economic growth, I will strategise to find new water resources in the mid-stream and the downstream of rivers. This will lead me to work with the Department of Environment (DoE) to make the wastewater discharge standard stricter. I will also urge the DoE to implement wastewater discharge standard to be a factor of pollution loading so that we can effectively implement pollution reversal in the mid-stream and downstream of rivers.

If I am collecting raw water charges in my state where raw water is partially supported by my neighbouring state, I will share it with the neighbouring state in return for protection of the catchment area with a legally binding agreement. Similarly, the raw water charges collected for my state will be fully used to protect the catchment areas and pollution reversal implementations.

My vision is to have a 20-year timeline to reach a complete pollution reversal benefit to meet increasing treated water demand. This will also allow me to keep the water tariff affordable as improvement in the raw water quality is equivalent to reducing water treatment cost.

Assuming that I succeeded in doing all that, I am sure the people and businesses would have felt the benefits during the five years of my tenure as mentri besar or chief minister, in the improvement of service quality, coverage of water supply and sewerage services, reduction of non-revenue water, drop in cases of river pollution, affordable tariff, joint billing and services for water treatment, supply and sewerage as well as protection of water resources for future generations.

Have we seen these changes in the last five years?

This article was contributed by Piarapakaran S, president of the Association of Water and Energy Research Malaysia (Awer), a nongovernment organisation involved in research and development in the fields of water, energy and environment.