The basic fact is that only 0.3 percent of global water is available for human consumption - only 3 per cent of the water on earth is fresh and most of it is locked away in the ice caps or is in deep underground aquifers.

A report by the World Health Organisation estimates that at the beginning of 2000 one-sixth (1.1 billion people) of the world's population was without access to improved water supply  and two-fifths (2.4 billion people) lacked access to improved sanitation .

The majority of these people live in Asia and Africa. Over the next 20 years, it is estimated that the average supply of water worldwide per person is expected to drop by a third. Water scarcity or stress - or having less than 1,700 cubic metres of water a person a year - would affect about 40 per cent of the world population. Chronic water shortage now affects 8 per cent.

Several reports produced  in the last decade on the water crisis provide the backdrop to the broad understanding that went into the making of the policies on water privatisation. A report put together by the United Nations  outlines some of the challenges we face at the turn of the century. The report of the World Commission on Water  and projects three future scenarios and the methods to deal with them.

The report of the Commission came up for sever criticism. In a statement , several NGOs and Civil Society organizations said, that the process by which the scenarios and the vision were developed, "has been controlled from the start by a small group of aid agency and water multinational officers, mainly from the Global water Partnership, the World water Council and the World Bank and Suez-Lyonesse des Eaux. The key conclusion of the report that these is a global water crisis which can be solved only with a massive increase in private funding for water projects in developing countries backed up with guarantees from the World Bank and other Aid Agencies was predetermined".
Another report, prepared for the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 projects a comparatively realistic picture of the status of freshwater resources and the key areas for action and policy interventions.
.
But the problem with most of the documents on the water crisis and the international discourse on water is not that water is increasingly seen as a `scarce resource’, which needs to be managed judiciously, but that `scarcity’ as it is constructed in global declarations and debates is often presented in absolute or monolithic terms, obscuring the complex nature of scarcity and its linkages with ecological, socio-political, temporal and anthropogenic dimensions.