Stealing

We live in a very nice building in Bombay that buys tanker water to make up for the shortfall in the city supply.

We are all familiar with these tankers; we see them on the roads all the time, and every one of they leaks water. Today is Holi so the building arranged for extra tankers for the festival and I had the chance to see one up close and measure the leakage which on this tanker was about 3 litre per minute.

The fellows charge 3,000 rupees for 10,000 litres, or .30 per litre.

Assume a 3 hour trip with the water and they owner just blew INR 162, or just over 5% of his take on waste which could be prevented by fitting about 162 INR of valves.

Why does the fellow tolerate a loss of very 5% of revenue when less than 1% of legitimate businesses in this country make even a 15% net margin? Because he is reselling us the water that he has in all probability stolen from the BMC, water that we have paid for.

Poor people naturally pay even more for their meager water supplies which go by hand pulled tanks, so there are fewer economies of scale.

He has in all probability paid for at least some of the diesel that he has used so he whines when the prices of fuel rise. But does he care about the water. Nah.

This is but a small and measurable example of the wretchedness wreaked upon us by our political masters, for masters they are.

The same happens in a much bigger way when the same masters give free electricity but not paid irrigation in order to pump our groundwater dry. They rob the entire country of water, and rob a great many people of their lives.