Whose water, whose power? How bad governance engineers injustice

WHEN we open a tap in Lahore, Karachi or Quetta and nothing safe comes out, the instinct is to blame the man at the pumping station or the contractor who laid a leaking pipe. But the deeper truth, argued powerfully by the legal scholar K. Sabeel Rahman in his work on structural justice and the infrastructure of inclusion, is that such crises are rarely the fault of one negligent official. They are products — the predictable outcome of laws, budgets and institutional choices made over decades. Injustice, in this reading, is not a natural disaster and not merely individual wrongdoing. It is engineered, however unintentionally, by the rules we live under. Rahman built his argument around the American experience, beginning with Flint, Michigan, where years of lead-poisoned water left a generation of schoolchildren needing special care. His point was that the contamination flowed not only from a treatment failure but from a chain of background decisions: agencies that stopped monitoring, austerity that hollowed out maintenance, the slow privatization of public utilities and patterns of segregation that pushed the heaviest environmental burdens onto poorer communities of colour. Read that sentence again with Pakistani place-names and it becomes uncomfortably familiar. Pakistan’s water emergency is among the starkest illustrations of this idea anywhere in the world. The Pakistan Medical Association has warned that roughly four in five Pakistanis lack access to genuinely safe drinking water, with the worst deprivation in rural Sindh and Balochistan. Independent testing of supplies in Karachi and Faisalabad has repeatedly found half or more of samples unfit to drink. Doctors now link this directly to a surge in kidney disease, with tens of thousands of new end-stage renal patients projected this year, while an estimated 53,000 children still die annually from diarrheal illness. Per capita water availability has collapsed from over 5,000 cubic metres at independence to under