Yasmina writing from Delhi… Mumbai train bombings

Yasmina Zaidman, our Water Portfolio manager, was recently in Delhi during the bombings. Here she shares her immediate reaction and reflections…

Within the last few hours news began streaming in that seven bomb blasts had gone off in Mumbai, killing more than a hundred people and injuring many times that number. As I sit in the Delhi airport waiting for my flight home, the numbers are being updated. Now it’s eight bomb blasts and 146 killed. Some of my fellow travelers are glued to the screen, and trying to get calls through to loved ones or colleagues, while others seem indifferent, as though this is business as usual. As far as I know, this is the biggest bombing since a series of blasts in 1993. I have been reading about the previous attacks in a current bestseller, Maximum City, and somehow as I was reading, the bombs seemed like a part of ancient history, some distant turbulent past. But now the past I was reading about is all too relevant to the present.

This is the backdrop as I sit down to reflect on the past two weeks of work to identify investment opportunities in the delivery of water and sanitation to low-income communities in India. Today I was in Jaipur visiting with an organization that is building community-based solutions to the extreme water scarcity faced by rural communities in Rajasthan. Later, when I heard the news about the bombings, I was meeting with an entrepreneur that has developed a rapidly growing business in the water sector and aims to deliver information and products to poor households in slums. Sitting here, I wonder, is there a link between the violence in Mumbai and the water crisis that is emerging throughout the country?

I ask myself if safe and reliable drinking water could even be a concern when the threat of violence looms, but at the same time, would this violence be as virulent if it weren’t for the extreme poverty and lack of basic services in the dense slums of Mumbai? I can’t answer any of these questions, but they are there in the back of my mind. The questions I would have asked before I heard about the bombs were: can the water challenges that India faces by addressed through markets alone? What is the right balance between the public sector and the private sector in meeting the needs of low-income communities? What will it take for water entrepreneurs to make serving the BOP a priority, and when they do, how can they leverage government and charitable funds to assure that their products reach those who need them most? Is it even their job? The big question I am left with is: whose job is it to solve these problems, and what is the incentive to do so? To this I think I have an answer. It is everyone’s job, for a thousand reasons. The violence that is being reported around me in several different languages by every channel that broadcasts here is just one of the many reasons.

Americans and Brits who anxiously witnessed terrorist attacks at home will perhaps empathize with the suffering and fear of Mumbai residents. My hope is that we will also ask ourselves tough questions about what the world will need to look like before we can realistically live without fear of violence, safe from the social, economic and political divisions that are so rampant today. Poverty alone is not the cause of violence or terror, but in a profoundly interconnected world that moves at the speed of megabytes per second, vast inequalities and injustices will undoubtedly lead to growing tension. Those who are left out, both by market failures and due to inefficient use of public and private resources, will not simply sit still, and a philosophy of violence can more easily take root in places where people are systematically marginalized.

So, as I settle down to write my call reports from meetings with social entrepreneurs, micro-finance institutions, banks and multinationals, I am imagining a world where all of us understand and accept the need to address the challenges that the poor face. That we do this not for them, out of a sense of obligation, and not for ourselves, out of a sense of self preservation, but ultimately, for the sake of the space we all share, this one world, where any of us could be a passenger on a train in India or a plane in New York. The fact that readers of this blog may not have been born in the deserts of the Thar in India or Pakistan, or in an overcrowded slum in Mumbai or Nairobi does not mean that we are off the hook. We should strive to work together on these problems, not so that we can find a way to co-exist, but because we already do.

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