It is common knowledge that earth’s surface is made up of over 70 percent water and that only one percent of that water is fresh water available for human needs. The combination of an exponentially growing world population, deterioration of farmable land, increasing industrial demand, as well as lots of other problems has brought about new challenges in the wake of water availability and distribution. Water will always be considered a public good and every human being on the planet has the right to necessary amounts of clean, quality drinking and sanitation water, but the method of distribution that best satisfies this need is now debated worldwide.
Over the past few decades there has been an increasing trend towards privatization of water, that is, at least some of the of water management has been taken from government control and placed into the hands of the private sector. This has been a big talk among human rights and environmentalist fear that making water disputation for profit will cause nothing but harm for everybody. While there have been a few setbacks in water privatization, the improvements in quality, availability, and distribution methods cannot go unnoticed. The goal of placing water distribution into the private sector is to decrease the number of people in the world who do not have access to quality drinking. The increasing growth of privatized water distribution shows that this could be the solution to the growing problem of water availability.
There are many advantages of water privatization. Privately-owned industries often have more incentive and expertise to ensure their businesses succeed, while the government may be politically motivated and prone to corruption. Private companies are often more efficient than governments due to free market competition leading to ‘lower prices, improved water quality, more choice, less red tape and quicker delivery’. Publicly owned companies are “required to be more accountable to the broader...