4 because of: inappropriate design, stemming in part from poor studies done prior to start-up; long gestation periods resulting from funding shortfalls due to changing government priorities and poor capital programming and budgeting; few managerial incentives to control costs; and reported corruption that typically involves kickbacks from construction companies.

11. In many countries, for cultural, political or religious reasons, water use is not priced at all, so there is little incentive to conserve. When it exists, water charges, are weUl below the cost of developing water resources. Therefore, it is not unusual to find cities in arid areas rationing water and foregoing potentially lucrative activities while neighboring farmers grow low-value water-intensive crops such as rice and alfalfa using inefficient irrigation technologies.

12. Moreover, government control of water has favored the relatively wealthy and has not been effective at ensuring access of the poor to water. In many cities in developing countries it is the poor that are excluded from piped municipal water and must resort to very expensive private water truckers to meet their daily needs. A review of water vending in sixteen cities (World Bank 1992) shows that the unit cost of vended water is 4 to 100 times higher than water from piped city supplies (the median cost was 12 times higher). Similarly, influential farmers manage to get easier access to water rights, which are obtained without charge, often at the expense of reducing availability for the poor, and for whose use farmers pay only a nominal charge.

13. Although public control over water is thought necessary to address environmental problems, governments usually fail to maintain water or soil quality. Unsafe water causes water borne diseases that result in the deaths of 3 million people annually and render sick more than a billion more. The discharge of untreated industrial waste, the runoff of agricultural chemicals, and poor land use practices in agriculture, forestry, and mining causes widespread degradation of land and water resources (World Bank 1993). Water logging and salinization have destroyed millions of hectares of fertile agricultural soils. In Pakistan, extensive water logging and secondary soil salinization has resulted in an estimated 10 percent of its irrigation system covering some 13.5 million hectares to be affected by salinity (Frederiksen, Berkoff, and Barber 1993). Sometimes public irrigation projects themselves lead to salinization. Until the 1960s, the Aral Sea in Russia was environmentally stable with a thriving commercial fishery. The massive diversion of the two largest rivers in Central Asia to expand irrigated cotton production eventually dried up the rivers and shrank the lake by 66 percent. Salinity increased, soils became waterlogged, fish spawning grounds dried up, and the fishery collapsed. An ecological catastrophe developed as winds picked up salt and pesticides from the dry lake bed, caused salt and pesticide storms, and ruined the productivity of farmland over a wide area (World Bank 1993).

# _Measures to Resolve Water Shortages and Improve Water Use_

14. In attempting to address the problems described above, there is increased attention being paid to management reforms such as though better planning and changes in bureaucratic structure and pricing policy. This approach is perhaps best reflected in a recent policy paper