David Foster sent this guest post, and he wants to know if the Lassi Shop (see below) should be (can be?) turned into a skit to teach people about water provision.

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Just a few days ago, I watched Christiana Amanpour interviewing Robert F. Kennedy Junior, founder of the Water Keeper Alliance and all around friend of the poor and the environment. Kennedy began by quoting a clever observation by Mark Twain that: “Whiskey’s for drinking and Water’s for fighting”. Unfortunately, he left out another Mark Twain quote that I believe is just as applicable: “It ain’t what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we know that ain’t necessarily so!”

Kennedy then began speaking on the many ills that confront the water sector and right at the very top was the Evil Threat of PRIVATIZATION. Now in my opinion Kennedy was absolutely right that sometimes private companies have done terrible things to the environment. Where I would fault him (and Amanpour) is in leaving the impression that private water systems have done more harm than public ones or that the poor and the environment would be just fine, if only we could keep the private sector out.

Now I know that I can’t get Kennedy or Amanpour to really visit the thousands of publicly run water systems throughout the developing world but I have this pipedream of having them come meet me at a “Lassi Shop” that is run on the same basic principles as a public water supply system in India.

There follows a brief description of the policies followed by the Lassi Shop — all of them close replicas of their respective counterparts in the typical municipal water system over here:

Meet Me At The Lassi Shop*

Imagine, if you will, a lassi shop that was run on the same basic principles as most Indian water supply systems…