Water, being crucial to life, have people ready to spend a major part of their income on it. It is this irreplaceable and unique quality of the resource that makes its availability so very important. Water as a resource and the debates and controversies that surround it have many in disagreement on how and who should manage this all important and scarce resource. Should it be recognized as a public good and a human right or as a commodity to be traded for financial gain in the open market? This is the big question with no concrete answers. Despite these debates, many countries have gone in for privatization hoping for greater efficiencies to their water supply as well as to cope better with this meagre and depleting resource. This book takes a look at privatization, the rationale behind privatization. Various dimensions of privatization and its implication are cover in the first section. The second section focuses on country experiences which include both success stories and experiences that have not been so good. Water privatization experiments in different parts of the world are covered in this book. The power to bring out emotions while reading the failures of privatisation and knowing that millions of people are deprived of this right induce the reader to ponder as to how this precious resource can be conserved, rather than expend wasteful energy on debating and fighting over who owns water and who needs to control the resource.
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