No other city in the world has consistently overestimated water
requirements so badly for over two decades.
Over the past several decades, Hong Kong's water supply and
wastewater management practices have been on an unsustainable
path. Poor planning, absence of sustained interest from its top
policymakers, an uninformed public, lack of regular media scrutiny and
a series of poor policy interventions have ensured that, today, it lags
behind nearly all cities of similar levels of economic development in its
management of water.
Hong Kong is a net water importer. Currently, 70-80 per cent is
imported from Guangdong's Dongjiang through multiple agreements.
The Audit Commission reported in 1999 that the planners had so badly
overestimated city water requirements in the 1989 agreement that
some 716 million cubic metres of water literally went down the drain,
which cost taxpayers, between 1994 and 1998, HK$1.7 billion.
Even after this sad performance, the next agreement was even worse.
The requirement was again another overestimate. Consequently,
between 2006 and 2012, the city had to pay for seven years of water
imports but in reality used only about six years of water. This over-
estimation cost the taxpayers another HK$2.8 billion.
As an adviser to 19 governments, I am not aware of a single city
anywhere in the world which has consistently overestimated water
requirements so badly for over two decades.
Not only has overestimation been a serious problem, but also no
serious policy measures were taken to manage domestic and industrial
water demands. At present, average water use in Hong Kong is about
220 litres per capita per day, a figure that is higher than in 2003. This
is bad management since in nearly all similar cities of the world, the
usage trends are generally declining because of better management
practices and increasing awareness of the people that water is a
scarce resource.
Accordingly, inhabitants of cities like Hamburg and Barcelona use
about half that of an average Hongkonger. In Singapore, per capita
water use has steadily come down in recent decades. It is now 152
litres per capita per day, which is still on the high side. An average
Hongkonger uses 45 per cent more.
One of the reasons for this very high usage is because water and
wastewater provisioning has been subsidised at higher levels with
each passing year. The water tariff has remained the same since 1995,
but costs of services have gone up steadily. This has resulted in some
ridiculous situations, like the city providing private bottled water
companies with highly subsidised water, which at the retail level is
being sold at over 1,000 times the cost of city water.
The present pricing structure means that a round 14 per cent of Hong
Kong residents do not pay for water and sewerage services. Each
household now receives completely free 12 cubic metres of water
every four months irrespective of their ability to pay. This is in contrast
to Singapore, where its national water agency, PUB, not only
completely recovers its costs but also makes a profit.
Furthermore, in Hong Kong, there have been no consistent attempts to
educate the citizens on the importance of water as a strategic
resource. This is again in sharp contrast to Singapore, where the
population is regularly made aware of the value of water. The
interactive permanent exhibitions of wastewater treatment and water
management at its NEWater Visitor Centre and Marina Barrage have
become major tourist destinations.
When compared to other Asian cities of similar levels of per capita
gross domestic product, like Singapore, Tokyo or Osaka, urban water
management in Hong Kong comes out very poorly. But even when
compared to some cities in developing countries, like Cambodia's
Phnom Penh, Hong Kong does not fare well.
For the past 15 years, the Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority has
outclassed Hong Kong. Like in Hong Kong, Phnom Penh residents
receive clean water which can be drunk straight from the tap. Both the
poor and the rich pay for water at affordable prices, and no one
receives free water, as in Hong Kong.
Phnom Penh's water authority, a public-sector autonomous
corporation, has been consistently profitable for over a decade and
receives no subsidy. All its performance indicators have been
consistently better than Hong Kong's, with many of them better than in
London or Los Angeles. Its planning and execution have also
surpassed Hong Kong's. For example, Phnom Penh's bill collection
ratio is almost 100 per cent, and unaccounted-for losses from the
water system are about 6.5 per cent, compared to about 17 per cent in
Hong Kong.
The question the Hong Kong public and policymakers need to ask and
answer is: how did a third world city like Phnom Penh, which has
limited technical and administrative capacities, no private sector to
speak of, inadequate educational and management facilities and poor
governance practices, manage to leapfrog a world-class city like Hong
Kong so thoroughly in little over a decade?
Urban water management is not rocket science. There is no reason
why any city of more than 200,000 people cannot have a good water
system. It is high time for Hong Kong to do some serious soul-
searching and find solutions which can radically improve its present
urban water system.
Asit K. Biswas is the Distinguished Visiting Professor at Lee Kuan
Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. An
adviser to 19 countries, he received the Stockholm Water Prize,
equivalent to a Nobel Prize in the area of water, in 2006
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