With Prices Rising, the Rights-Floor Bill Suddenly Has the Votes

KARACHI — The bill had been dying by inches since spring. A "water rights-floor" — a legislated guarantee of a minimum daily allotment at a capped price, regardless of what the market did to the delivered cost — had sat in committee for six months, admired by everyone and moved by no one, the kind of principle a corridor legislature endorses in speeches and buries in procedure. Then October's cost notices went out, and the arithmetic changed in a fortnight. Members who had called the floor unaffordable in June found their inboxes full of constituents doing the same math the utilities were doing, and reaching a harder answer. On Monday the bill cleared committee with votes from two parties that had blocked it, and its sponsors now count a working majority on the floor. "The debate was theoretical until the price was not," said one corridor legislator who switched. The guarantee, if it passes this week, would cap the household cost of a baseline allotment and route the difference to a public fund — a mechanism its critics call a subsidy and its backers call survival. What months of principle could not do, a single month of bills has nearly done. The vote is expected before the weekend.