Pay your sewerage bills
impact on public health at 7,000 plants is indeed an eye-opener.
“No other country in the world is managing that many treatment plants as we do. And yet IWK is an award-winning company and internationally recognised as the best managed sewerage company in Asia,” he told me.
In fact, only two days ago, Haniffa was in Singapore to pick up yet another award, the CMO Asia Leadership Award for Water and Wastewater Efficiency. It’s the highest recognition for corporate organisations that have a significant and positive impact on the lives of people around them.
In the past few years, IWK has also been an active mentor to many emerging and developing countries like India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia as well as the Middle East and parts of Africa. It does this via the Asian Development Bank, World Bank, USAID, the Gates Foundation and uses the government to business approach on various aspects of sewerage management and operations.
For all these, IWK’s efficiency is a top priority despite it being a very lean company of 3,500 staff.
That it is imperative for customers to pay their bills is even more compelling given the fact that not only have the rates not been increased but have been lowered four times over the years since the privatisation days in 1994.
According to market rates, the cost of providing such a service comes up to RM30 a household monthly instead of between RM2 and RM8. So it’s highly subsidised to say the least.
So this column is appealing to all IWK customers who are still in arrears or habitually ignore their bills because they feel it’s not worth their while to go to the counter just to pay RM2, to think hard and pay promptly.
I am somewhat sentimental about this issue because in the run-up to the privatisation exercise for sewerage services over 20 years ago, in briefings by top IWK executives which I attended as a journalist, I told them that I could foresee this problem of unpaid bills.
Reason being, earlier, the sewerage service run by local government authorities was charged via the property assessment bill and a separate sewerage billing was something new.
And many consumers tend not to pay up simply because unlike for water or electricity bills where the service providers could disconnect supply for non-payment, IWK could not disconnect an individual household’s sewerage pipe as it’s interconnected to the entire system.
So I then suggested to them to incorporate the sewerage bill into the household water bill as people normally won’t default paying for water.
This suggestion was brushed off by the executives as not possible because it would mean amendments to some laws.
To which, my response was let it be and why not?
On hindsight, I still maintain that for IWK to resolve this chronic problem of unpaid bills that could easily come to RM1 billion any time soon, the authorities perhaps can revisit my original suggestion.
All the best to them and to IWK, a very big Thank You for your wonderful work and to the staff who are to me, our unsung heroes.