Access to clean water is a basic human right. Therefore every home should have a water supply that is provided free of charge. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

To begin, providing water entirely free of charge is likely to encourage overconsumption and wastage, thereby jeopardising long-term supply. To clarify, when a resource carries no financial cost, individuals have little incentive to conserve it, unlike scarce commodities such as electricity, for which metered billing visibly discourages excessive use. For instance, households with unmetered access to free water are statistically far more likely to leave taps running or maintain leaking pipes for extended periods, since no financial penalty accompanies such negligence, and repair costs may even seem an unnecessary expense. This unchecked consumption can deplete reservoirs and strain ageing infrastructure, particularly in drought-prone regions, ultimately jeopardising, in the long run, the very right the policy was originally intended to protect.

However, an exception should be made for households below the poverty line, for whom even modest water charges can prove genuinely prohibitive. To illustrate, low-income families are sometimes forced to ration drinking water to afford other necessities, such as food or medicine, when water bills compete directly with subsistence spending, occasionally compromising basic hygiene as a result. Granting a limited free allowance, sufficient for essential drinking, cooking and sanitation needs, while charging market rates beyond this threshold, would reconcile the humanitarian objective of universal access with the practical necessity of resource conservation for society as a whole.

To conclude, while I disagree that water should be entirely free for every single household, given the resultant risk of wastage, I maintain that a basic free allowance for economically disadvantaged families would fulfil the humanitarian intent of this right without undermining sustainable resource management.