The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Merchants of Thirst
In Nepal and many other countries, private tanker operators profit from growing water scarcity.
KATHMANDU, Nepal — It had been 11 days since a ruptured valve reduced Kupondole district’s pipeline flow to a dribble, and the phones at Pradeep Tamanz’s tanker business wouldn’t stop ringing. A Malaysian Embassy residence had run perilously low on water, and the diplomats wanted to shower. They’d pay extra for a swift delivery. A coffee processing plant was on the verge of shutting down production after emptying its storage tank. It, too, would shell out whatever amount of money it would take. Across the neighborhood and other parts of the city, the calls were coming in so feverishly that Sanjay, a tanker driver, jokily wondered if he might get carjacked. “This is like liquid gold,” he said, jabbing at his precious cargo, large amounts of which seeped from every hatch. “Maybe more than gold.”
Dashing from filling stations to houses and factories and back, Tamanz tried to meet demand. His three tanker crews slept in one- or two-hour spurts, often in the cramped, refrigerator-sized truck cabins, and kept tankers on the road for up to 19 hours a day. He fobbed off business to competitors, an unusual practice in the cutthroat world of Kathmandu tanker men, and even sounded out a mechanic about converting a flatbed truck into a new tanker. With fat profits pouring in, the young businessman figured it might soon repay its cost.
But no matter how hard the crews worked or how furiously they pushed their lumbering vehicles over the potholed roads, there was no satisfying the city’s needs. The going was too slow. The water shortage too severe. By the time the pipeline was fully restored, some households had subsisted on nothing but small jerrycans for almost an entire month. “You know it’s not even peak season, but this is what happens here,” Tamanz said. “Just imagine what things would be like if we didn’t exist?”
In Kathmandu, as in much of South Asia and parts of the Middle East, South America and sub-Saharan Africa, these men and their tanker trucks sometimes prevent entire cities from running dry. Without them, millions of households wouldn’t have sufficient water to cook, clean or wash. Or perhaps any at all. And without them, an already deteriorating infrastructure might break down completely, as the tanker men know well. “The city depends on us,” said Maheswar Dahal, a businessman who owns six trucks in Kathmandu’s Jorpati district. “There would be disaster if we didn’t do our work.”
Yet there’s another side to them, too, one that is less pleasant and sometimes outright nasty. Tankers frequently deliver poor quality water, which can sicken. They usually charge much more than the state, devastating to the poor. Tanker water costs on average 10 times more than government-supplied pipeline water, according to a World Resources Institute study of water access in 15 cities across the developing world, a figure that rises to 52 times more in Mumbai.
Greedy, uncompromising and fearful of being knocked from their perch, some tanker operators even conspire among themselves to fortify the conditions that contributed to their emergence in the first place. Locals tell tales of frequent underhand dealmaking, pipeline sabotage and egregious environmental destruction. “They’re all thieves, rotten thieves, who should be hanged,” said Dharaman Lama, a landlady who rents out rooms in the Nepali capital. “It’s disgusting what they do to us.”
Leaky beasts
In some ways, these tankers are just another phase in a decades-long global process of water privatization. Many authorities believe the private sector is better at eking results out of overwhelmed utilities and have given up control of key resources. Tankers have piggybacked off that trend to secure contracts, or simply muscle in, across dozens of cities — even as officials elsewhere have concluded that water is best kept in public hands and reined in corporatized services.
The tanker fleet in Karachi, Pakistan, might have doubled over the past decade. The number in Lagos, Nigeria, has quadrupled during that time, two researchers there estimated, though, like in many other cities, its tankers operate in such administrative shadows that not even ballpark estimates exist. In Yemen, tankers have cornered much of the urban market since the Saudi-led military intervention began in 2015. And throughout the Indian subcontinent, in particular, tanker businesses big and small have boomed as the region’s cities have swelled. Often arriving in puffs of acrid black smoke, these leaky, rustcoated beasts have become a ubiquitous sight from Bangladesh to Bolivia.
But the tanker industry might also be an early illustration of how parts of the private sector stand to profit from a warming and fast-urbanizing world. The urban population of South Asia alone is projected to almost triple to 1.2 billion by 2050, and as infrastructure decays and cities continue to sprawl into areas that aren’t served at all, tankers are well-placed to absorb some of the shortfall. Up to 1.9 billion city dwellers might experience seasonal water shortages by midcentury, according to the World Bank.
“Tankers meet a need in the short and medium term,” said Victoria Beard, a professor of city and regional planning at Cornell University. “You can function without electricity, but not without water. And where you have no alternatives, you’re going to have all sorts of players filling the gap.”
For city authorities already struggling to maintain the current supply, let alone source additional water, tankers can seem like a safety net they feel powerless to resist. When severe drought emptied Cape Town’s reservoirs in 2017 and 2018, wealthy residents sidestepped restrictions by buying extra water from informal operators. When Chennai, one of India’s largest cities, almost ran dry amid weak rains this summer, over 5,000 private tankers ferried in water from outside. As these shocks intensify and affect more cities, the tanker men look set for boom times.
Perched at the foot of the waterrich Himalayas and blessed with a fierce monsoon, Kathmandu should never have become a poster child for perils of tanker dependence. But years of rampant state mismanagement and booming in-migration from the countryside have hugely overextended the pipeline network. Interviews with dozens of businessmen, officials and residents reveal how much the tanker industry has taken full advantage.
Beginning in the late 1990s, tankers began to spread from neighborhood to neighborhood, picking up customers among both poor and rich residents. At first, they were welcomed as a solution to the city’s interminable water pipeline disruptions. That soon changed as the less affluent began to chafe at high prices and unsavory practices. Previously run-of-the-mill tasks, like washing, began to require careful financial calculations. “Before, I didn’t think about how often I could shower or when I can clean the house,” said Laxmi Magar, a housewife and mother of six. “But now that water is so expensive I watch every drop.”
Many families have been forced to alter what they cook, how they cook and whom they host. Water-intensive dishes, such as spinach, are off the menu for many. Large open fires in aging apartment blocks are frowned upon because there is insufficient water to douse flames if they spread. In a country where hospitality is treasured, guests are sometimes unwanted, or almost feared, as extra bodies to accommodate. At roughly 1,800 Nepali rupees ($15.60) for 5,000 liters, tanker water is about 40 times costlier than pipeline water.
Among the city’s poorest and most vulnerable, tanker shenanigans have fueled some of the worst urban water access in the world. Because few of Kathmandu’s slums are connected to the water grid, they’re dependent on outside assistance during the dry season. The tankers raise their rates accordingly. And because many of these areas have narrow, tuk-tuk-wide streets sprawled across steep hills that often turn to mush in the monsoon, the bigger trucks can’t get through, meaning residents have to buy in smaller sums from middlemen at grossly inflated prices. Even ostensibly middle-class families are suffering as a consequence.
Nira Kasaju and her husband work in government factories in Bhaktapur, a city a few miles to Kathmandu’s east, and together earn more than their neighbors. But with limited vehicular access to their crumbling 17th-century apartment building, they depend on narrow-bodied, tractor-drawn tankers that sell water at double the normal rate. They’ve since had to cut back on everything from toys for their children to holiday decorations. “Whatever it costs, we pay. We have no choice,” Kasaju said. “This is unacceptable, of course, but what can we do?”
The World Health Organization recommends that households spend no more than 3 to 5% of their income on water, but tanker-dependent Nepalis shell out up to 20% of their earnings, a figure that can rise to over 50% in parts of rural Jordan.
Many customers say they would be able to manage the expense if only the water came clean.
But that’s increasingly not the case. Residents report frequent skin problems, intestinal bugs and diarrhea, which compels those who can afford it to spend more money on “jugs” of potable water, and forces those who can’t to miss school or workdays. Again, it’s the poorest and most captive customers who get the worst of the water. (It could be even worse. Tankers in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba have been known to fill from chlorinated swimming pools, according to a WRI researcher in that city.)
Tankers strike deals with corrupt officials to limit pipeline flow and thus maximize their earnings, while also fighting public works projects that might break their strangleholds. In Lalitpur, Kathmandu’s adjoining city, residents said tankers paid officials not to fix many of the free, ornate public standpipes that were knocked out by the 2015 earthquake. It’s a similar situation in Bangalore, India, where some state valve men are reportedly conspiring with businessmen.
Competition among Kathmandu’s roughly 400 tanker-owning businessmen is so ferocious that they regularly smash one another’s vehicles and call in favors from friendly politicians to shut down rivals. “The competition is just unhealthy,” said Dharmanda Shresthra, who owns three tankers and a water bottling factory. “Everyone is always after each other and after profit, and it affects the quality of the water.”
And, crucially, the kingpins have few inhibitions about over-exploiting water resources, jeopardizing the environment and their cities’ long-term vitality. Tankers are tapping groundwater so relentlessly that many wells yield up to 20% less water every year. Dozens of deep boreholes and springs have already been exhausted. Unless there is a dramatic change of course, water experts — and many of the tanker men themselves — fear there will soon be few local resources left to tap.
Standing alongside the water filling station he operates at Khahare, in the hills to the south of Kathmandu, Krishna Hari Thapa was in a reflective mood in October. For the best part of a decade, he’s watched — and profited — as the number of tankers at his spring has risen from around 30 to over 80 a day. He’s watched too as the once mighty local spring has slowed to an unimpressive trickle. “Twenty years ago, it was like a river here, and now it’s not. You can only guess what it will look like in another 20 years,” he said. But Thapa won’t stop, no matter how low the flow goes, he says. The money is too good. And besides, “where else would people get water?”
‘Public sector failed’
Amid mounting public anger and shriveling resources, even big-time tanker operators admit their industry is out of control. For all their distasteful ways, though, the tanker men say they’re not the biggest villains in this sordid saga. That label, they insist, is best applied to the state, without whose repeated failures they never would have had an opening. The industry has a point. “Let’s face it: The private sector came in because the public sector failed,” said Dipak Gyawali, a political economist and former water minister. “And until you clean up government’s act, nothing will change. The tankers are just a symptom.”
These failures begin with the pipelines. Kathmandu Valley’s water delivery is so poor that its recipients average as little as one hour of running water every week, during which they’re expected to fill rooftop or underground cisterns. The pressure is so weak that many households capture no more than 250 liters on each occasion. For these people and the roughly 30% of residents who receive nothing at all, tankers tide them over until the next pipeline flow. Officials recognize it’s a crisis but say the solution is out of their hands.
“Frankly speaking, the demand-supply gap is huge: Demand is 400 million liters a day. Supply varies from 90 to 150 million liters,” said Sanjeev Bickram Rana, the executive director of the Kathmandu Valley Water Supply Management Board. “How can we bridge that gap?”
The roads in the area also impede water delivery to residents. Most trucks source their water in places like Khahare, where the terrain begins its slow climb to the Himalayas. But the rural roads are so rough that they can’t drive fast for fear of snapping axles, and the city’s poorly designed transport network is frequently snarled with traffic. Businessmen say their trucks could perform double their current daily average of four deliveries and thus sell more cheaply if they could move quicker.
Drying out
Growth in Kathmandu, as in most South Asian cities, is far outpacing that of the region at large. In addition to the tankers’ over-exploitation of boreholes, the city is eating into its remaining forests, which feed the springs, while also sprawling over aquifer recharge areas. For much of the rainy season and the months that follow, many households use hand pumps to extract from the shallow aquifers under their properties and provide for at least some of their needs, but the more the valley is tarmacked over, the less the groundwater is replenished. Climate change, in turn, is making the rains more erratic, which limits rooftop rainwater harvesting, and fuels floods that contaminate some aquifers.
And as this gap between supply and demand widens, the public is beginning to lash out. Residents of water-impoverished districts have assaulted water officials when they venture into their areas. Water tankers have been attacked when they have gone on strike, and people are increasingly fighting each other as water becomes scarcer and more expensive.