Who Should Control Our Water?

Posted by Renuka Rayasam

During the Industrial Revolution, when people moved to cities en masse, household and human waste began to mix in Berlin’s gutters. A stench rose from the street. Fouled water lead to deadly outbreaks of cholera and other water-borne diseases. By 1852, the Prussian government had to do something: it hired an English company, Fox and Crampton, to take over the city’s water service. It was one of the early Western experiments in the privatization of water.

Because water is so abundant—it rains from the sky, it collects in the earth—it feels like it should be free. The United Nations even recognized water as a human right in 2010. “It’s not like shoes,” Saskia Solar, a spokeswoman at Berlin’s water authority, told me. “Water is something fundamental to our existence.” But delivering safe water comes at a cost, and the fight over who should bear that cost has transformed water—and the merits and shortcomings of privatizing it—into an ideological battleground.