 The world is full of water and yet we go around worrying about the fact that in most places we are running out of water or our activities are restricted because of the quality of water. How much does a barrel of oil cost? Order of magnitude, $10, $50. How much does a barrel of water cost? As a sector, water is very diverse and as a result not very well understood in terms of the actions that people need to take. Where does most of the water go? Who uses it? Most of the water on the planet is used for growing food. The next biggest consumer is energy. Agriculture is the largest user of water on the planet. It's also the most inefficient user of water on the planet. Now people are pumping water for agriculture which happens to consume globally 70% of the water, diversion 85% of the water in places like India 90 to 95% of the water. So that's your economy of water. 40 to 60% of the total electricity consumed in those regions is simply to pump water up for agriculture, not for anything else. So why do we need water for energy production? The first thing that many people think of is, oh, it's all those ugly dams and hydropower plants. But frankly, that water just goes right on through in a way that's a service provided by water but it's not consumption or water. The place where water is needed for energy production is cooling at the power plants. So water is also used for energy extraction. So if I want to mine coal, if I want to extract oil, in all of these operations there is a fair amount of water used in the extraction process. Most of the water is controlled by the public sector. There will be at least 6 to 10 government organizations that have some responsibility over water and do not interact with each other. The private sector does a much better job of cost recovery. So one of the models that is prevalent is what's called the design-build-operate model. The infrastructure is owned by the public sector, but the contract that is given out is to design, build and operate by the private sector. And the idea there is if the person is designing and operating, they will think differently about what to do. About 5 to 10 years ago, France adopted a different model, which is the following. The rates are set by a committee of stakeholders in every watershed and those rates are clearly demarcated into recovery of cost of service plus recovery for watershed management. So if you could engender that sort of a business model, would you then accept commercialization of water, so to speak? If such an experiment is deemed successful in France, would you deem this experiment as worth doing in a dictatorship in Africa? One of the things that is coming up in the vernacular today is what's called multi-use solutions. The kind of examples people give is that maybe it is okay to have rice paddies, which are water guzzlers because what we are going to do is we are also going to put fish in it. And then you have a protein source, a high-value protein source in terms of income for the farmer and you have his calorie need being taken care of. So it's the integration across these things that's where in a way the opportunity comes. Each one of those opportunities is currently a discrete and separate opportunity in different fields of government. It's only when you start looking at the support for all the other sectors of the economy that comes from the water infrastructure that people start realizing the income potential. The biggest problem is a lack of transparency, a lack of data and a lack of analysis as to what the issues are. The economics of water is lost in the aspect of the human right to water. It's lost in the environmental push to have water for ecosystems. By the very fact that it shows up in so many different sectors of the economy, its actual importance is diluted out.