A City Council Votes to Read Its Own Water Ledger Aloud

JAKARTA — The motion was three sentences long and it took the city assembly four hours to pass. From this month, Jakarta's metropolitan council will publish, in full and in plain language, the household-by-household water-allocation ledger that relief contractors have kept privately for years — the same class of accounting that governs corridors from the Sahel to the Java coast. "If a number decides who drinks, that number belongs to the public, not to the firm that prints it," said councillor Sri Wahyuni, who tabled the measure after constituents complained they could not learn why their ration had been cut. Contractors warned that publishing the ledger could expose the poorest households to scrutiny; the council answered that secrecy had exposed them worse. The vote binds only Jakarta, home to some fourteen million, but three other Concordat cities have asked for the drafting notes. The council did not create the meter. It voted, for once, to let the metered read it.