WHEN we open a tap in Lahore, Karachi or Quetta and nothing safe comes out, the instinct is to blame the man at the pumping station or the contractor who laid a leaking pipe. But the deeper truth, argued powerfully by the legal scholar K. Sabeel Rahman in his work on structural justice and the infrastructure of inclusion, is that such crises are rarely the fault of one negligent official. They are products — the predictable outcome of laws, budgets and institutional choices made over decades. Injustice, in this reading, is not a natural disaster and not merely individual wrongdoing. It is engineered, however unintentionally, by the rules we live under.
Rahman built his argument around the American experience, beginning with Flint, Michigan, where years of lead-poisoned water left a generation of schoolchildren needing special care. His point was that the contamination flowed not only from a treatment failure but from a chain of background decisions: agencies that stopped monitoring, austerity that hollowed out maintenance, the slow privatization of public utilities and patterns of segregation that pushed the heaviest environmental burdens onto poorer communities of colour. Read that sentence again with Pakistani place-names and it becomes uncomfortably familiar.
Pakistan’s water emergency is among the starkest illustrations of this idea anywhere in the world. The Pakistan Medical Association has warned that roughly four in five Pakistanis lack access to genuinely safe drinking water, with the worst deprivation in rural Sindh and Balochistan. Independent testing of supplies in Karachi and Faisalabad has repeatedly found half or more of samples unfit to drink. Doctors now link this directly to a surge in kidney disease, with tens of thousands of new end-stage renal patients projected this year, while an estimated 53,000 children still die annually from diarrheal illness. Per capita water availability has collapsed from over 5,000 cubic metres at independence to under 1,000 today — the recognized threshold of acute scarcity.
Meanwhile the Ravi, Sutlej, Kabul, Swat and lower Indus systems are turning into channels of untreated sewage and industrial discharge. In Karachi, the absence of a reliable public supply has handed control to an informal “tanker mafia,” so that the poorest households pay the most for the most basic necessity of life. Rahman’s framework tells us not to read this as a string of separate misfortunes. It is the visible surface of background institutional rules: weak environmental regulators that are rarely enforced, municipal bodies starved of funds, industrial actors free to pollute because looking the other way serves powerful interests and urban planning that has long concentrated poverty and toxins in Katchi Abadis and peri-urban settlements. The crisis, in other words, is structural — and what is structured by choice can be restructured by choice.
The second, sharper half of Rahman’s argument concerns how public power is dismantled. He describes neoliberalism not merely as an economic theory of free markets but as a deliberate political project. The danger, he warns, is that decisions affecting millions migrate out of democratic, accountable hands and into private, profit-seeking ones, where ordinary citizens have no vote and little recourse. The lesson is not that the state is automatically virtuous or the private sector automatically predatory. It is that who holds power and whether that power is accountable, matters more than the label on the door.
What, then, is the goal? Rahman urges us to think bigger than restoring trust in government or nudging up economic growth. He frames today’s inequality as a problem of domination — the concentration of arbitrary, unaccountable power over people’s lives — and proposes emancipation as the answer: freedom from entrenched economic, ethnic and gender disadvantage and the freedom of communities to actually flourish. For Pakistan, that reframing is clarifying. A child in interior Sindh drinking contaminated water is not simply unlucky; she is subject to a system in which decisions about her water, her sewage and her clinic are made far above her, by actors she cannot hold to account. Emancipation would mean building institutions that make those background decisions visible and changeable — and that are themselves answerable to the people they serve.
This is the constructive heart of Rahman’s case and the part most relevant to us. Defending or merely “restoring” public institutions is not enough; the task is to rebuild them to be both capable and democratic. We need regulators with the authority and resources to actually monitor polluters and water quality, municipal and provincial bodies empowered under the spirit of the 18th Amendment’s devolution to deliver services close to citizens and privatization processes — where they happen — bound by open, rules-based scrutiny rather than backroom bargaining. Administrative institutions, in his words, must be reconstructed so that inclusive economic freedom and democracy become facts of daily life rather than slogans.
The water crisis is a useful mirror because everyone uses water and no one can pretend it is someone else’s problem. But the underlying pattern repeats across our power sector, our cities and our public finances. Pakistan’s twenty-first-century challenge, like the one Rahman describes, is twofold: we must build state capacity strong enough to dismantle the root drivers of injustice and we must build that capacity in a way that is accountable to ordinary people rather than to the next vested interest. That is a far harder project than blaming the man at the pumping station. It is also the only one that will actually deliver clean water — and a fairer country — to the next generation.
—The writer is Commoner from 44th Common Educationist — Founder of WHI Institute.based in Sargodha.
