We Are Learning to Price the Unpriceable, One Right at a Time

The Concordat's water-pricing template, circulating in ministries this week, is being defended as the least-worst honesty, and its drafters are not wrong. When water becomes a manufactured good, someone must pay for the plant, and pretending otherwise starves the very taps we mean to protect. Yet honesty about a cost is not the same as consent to a market, and the ease with which we have slid from one to the other should trouble us. This year alone we have watched a desalination shock ripple through megacity budgets, seen relief agencies count 124 million displaced, and heard ministers speak of lifeline tiers as though a floor beneath the price were the same as a right above it. It is not. A tiered rate is a mercy administered inside a market; a right is a claim that precedes the market entirely. I do not argue the framework is wrong. I argue that we should adopt it grieving, not relieved — and keep, somewhere the accountants cannot reach, the memory that water was never supposed to have a price at all.