Access to clean water is a basic human right. Therefore every home should have a water supply that is provided free of charge. Do you agree or disagree?

1While safe drinking water is universally recognized as a fundamental human necessity, some argueAccess to clean water is a basic human right. Yet some now argue that, because it is a right, every home should receive it free of charge. From my perspective, this reasoning is flawed: an unrestricted free supply would exacerbate water scarcity and environmental pollution, and would ultimately undermine the very right it seeks to protect.

If clean water 2is provided free of chargecosts nothing, households will gradually treat it as an entitlement rather than a scarce resource, and consumption will rise accordingly. This overuse may deplete reserves and trigger shortages. 3Cape Town's 2018 "Day Zero" crisis, for example, showed how quickly a city can run dry once residents treat supply as unlimited. Such habits also 4strain wastewater infrastructurefeed into sewage systems, whose overloading can contaminate rivers and degrade the environment.

At the national level, the same logic applies. Given the uneven distribution of water resources, governments must plan and allocate supply carefully. Were domestic consumption to surge unchecked, industrial and agricultural users would face serious shortfalls, causing 6factory shutdowns, job losses, and higher food pricesfactory shutdowns, job losses and higher food prices across the economy.

Admittedly, proponents of free water point out that no family should be denied a necessity, and South Africa's Free Basic Water policy was introduced with exactly this aim. In practice, however, it has encouraged waste among 7affluent householdsbetter-off households while leaving the distribution network 8underfunded in terms of infrastructure maintenanceshort of maintenance funds. We should therefore not jump to the conclusion that water must be entirely free; instead, governments can levy charges according to household income and 9guarantee free or heavily subsidized quotas for impoverished householdsoffer subsidies to those who genuinely cannot afford their bills.

In a nutshell, low-income households should be given 10subsidized water tariffscheaper water, but this does not mean that all charges should be abolished. 11Pricing waterPricing water, then, is not a denial of human rights but the only way to guarantee them in the long run.