As climate shocks intensify and global investors look to water as the next frontier, Sri Lanka faces a defining choice: defend its rivers and aquifers as a public trust or let scarcity turn a basic right into a business opportunity.
There is a phrase increasingly used in meetings about Sri Lanka’s future: natural capital. It sounds benign, even sensible. It suggests that forests, wetlands, rivers and groundwater should be properly valued rather than treated as expendable. But for many farmers, environmental campaigners and water specialists, the language carries a more unsettling implication. What happens when something essential to life is given a price?
That question has become urgent. Sri Lanka is an island of monsoon rains, ancient reservoirs and powerful rivers yet it is also facing increasingly violent swings between flood and drought. It is a country where water has shaped civilisation for more than two millennia and where access to it still determines whether a family can farm, cook, bathe or stay in business.
Now, as global institutions and private investors turn their attention towards water scarcity, there are fears that freshwater may be viewed not simply as a public resource, but as an asset to be traded, exported and monetised.
A Sunday Times investigation, A Price Tag on Lanka’s Water, warned of a growing push to treat upper watersheds through the language of ecosystem services, shadow pricing and natural capital accounting. The newspaper did not argue that every conservation initiative is a conspiracy but it raised a vital democratic question: who gets to decide the value of water and in whose interests?
The question should not be dismissed as nationalist paranoia. Water is becoming a geopolitical resource. Droughts across Europe, Australia, the Americas and parts of Asia have sharpened global anxiety about access to freshwater. The World Economic Forum has repeatedly listed water crises among the world’s leading long term risks. Across the globe, cities, corporations and governments are searching for dependable supplies. Sri Lanka should be wary of entering that conversation on terms set elsewhere.
The country’s rivers, reservoirs, springs and aquifers are not ordinary commodities. They are part of a shared inheritance, built and maintained through public investment, community labour and ecological systems far older than the modern state. They support paddy cultivation, tea estates, hydropower, fisheries, wildlife, industry and domestic life. To treat that water primarily as a marketable resource would be to misunderstand what it is.
The case for protecting water as a public good is therefore not sentimental. It is practical.
A country drowning and thirsting at once
The water crisis is not simply about an absence of rain. It is about timing, storage, access, pollution and governance.
In recent years, the island has experienced the kind of climate instability that turns old assumptions upside down. Cyclone Ditwah in November 2025 brought extraordinary rainfall, floods and landslides across much of the country. Soon afterwards, prolonged dry conditions put pressure on household water supplies and agriculture. Strong El Niño conditions could bring further extremes in 2026-27. This is the new reality: too much water in one place, too little in another and neither arriving when communities need it.
Yet the response remains divided between dozens of agencies with overlapping responsibilities. Water management involves the Irrigation Department, the Mahaweli Authority, the National Water Supply and Drainage Board, the Water Resources Board, the Central Environmental Authority, provincial authorities and several agricultural and environmental bodies. The International Water Management Institute has identified institutional fragmentation as a major obstacle to climate adaptation and effective water governance in Sri Lanka.
That fragmentation does not merely create paperwork. It weakens accountability. When a river is polluted, an aquifer depleted, a catchment damaged or a reservoir poorly managed, responsibility can disappear into the gaps between institutions.
The government has acknowledged that the present structure is failing. In June 2025, the cabinet appointed a ministerial subcommittee to revisit the National Water Resources Policy, according to the cabinet office. That review must not become another report gathering dust. It should become the basis for a clear national settlement: freshwater is held in trust for the people of Sri Lanka and every state institution is accountable for protecting it.
A unified National Water Resources Authority could help provide that clarity. It should coordinate basin planning, water allocation, groundwater monitoring, drought preparedness and climate forecasting while reporting to parliament rather than operating as an opaque technical body. Its task would not be to centralise every local decision in Colombo. It would be to ensure that local needs, scientific evidence and national priorities are not working against one another.
The authority should also publish simple, public measures of water security: minimum reservoir levels, safe groundwater extraction limits, the condition of major watersheds and drought risk projections. A proposal for an expanded National Water Supply and Drainage Board points to the need for stronger national capacity. But expanding powers without strengthening public oversight would repeat the same mistake in a new form.
The danger of putting a price on a river
There is a reasonable argument for recognising the economic contribution of healthy ecosystems. Forests reduce erosion. Wetlands store floodwater. Watersheds sustain agriculture and hydropower. Ignoring these benefits has long enabled destructive development. But there is a sharp line between acknowledging ecological value and transforming water into a commodity.
The Sunday Times warned that the language of global common goods and shadow pricing could leave Sri Lanka vulnerable to outside interests that see freshwater as an untapped commercial frontier. Its concern was not that water should be free in every circumstance. Pipes, treatment plants, repairs and sanitation systems all cost money. The concern was that an economic framework could gradually normalise the idea that natural freshwater itself is available for private extraction and profit. That distinction matters.
A household tariff designed to maintain public infrastructure is not the same as selling a river. A charge that discourages waste is not the same as granting investors a long term claim over an aquifer. A public programme that protects a watershed is not the same as allowing a financial market to decide its worth.
Sri Lanka should state this plainly in law. Water drawn from rivers, reservoirs, rain-fed catchments and groundwater reserves should never be privatised or treated as an export commodity. Any licence affecting these resources should be subject to parliamentary scrutiny, rigorous environmental assessment and automatic review during droughts or emergencies.
Canada offers an instructive precedent. Despite possessing a significant share of the world’s freshwater, it has resisted large scale bulk water exports, partly because of fears that classifying water as a tradable commodity could constrain future regulation under international trade rules. That caution reflects a simple principle: governments must retain the ability to protect water in moments of scarcity.
Sri Lanka has even more reason to be careful. Its rainfall may be abundant in aggregate but its usable freshwater is unevenly distributed, highly seasonal and increasingly vulnerable to climate disruption. The country cannot afford to discover, too late, that contracts signed in prosperous years make it harder to protect communities in dry ones.
Water sovereignty should not mean isolation. Sri Lanka can cooperate on science, climate finance, catchment restoration and technology transfer. But cooperation must begin with the understanding that freshwater belongs to the public, not to foreign investors, local monopolies or whichever institution can most successfully turn it into a balance-sheet asset.
Fix the leaks before chasing the next mega-project
The most immediate water source that can be developed is not a new dam, a distant aquifer or an export scheme. It is the water already being lost.
The National Water Supply and Drainage Board has struggled with high levels of non-revenue water: water that is produced but does not generate income because it leaks, is stolen or is inaccurately measured. Development Asia reported in 2025 that losses in parts of the system approached 50% while the Galle Water Supply Scheme recorded non-revenue water at about 45%.
Those figures should provoke national outrage. Every litre leaking from an ageing pipe is a litre that has already been collected, treated and pumped at public expense. In a country facing drought risk, it is hard to justify expensive new supply projects while so much existing water is disappearing underground.
Reducing leakage is less glamorous than inaugurating a desalination plant or a new reservoir. It does not offer politicians an easy ribbon cutting moment. But it is one of the fastest and most equitable routes to improved water security.
The answer requires sustained investment: district metered areas, modern flow meters, acoustic leak detection, pressure management, digital monitoring, accurate mapping of buried pipes and properly trained regional repair teams. The government’s Climate-Resilient Sustainable Water Supply and Sanitation Project, supported by a $250m Asian Development Bank programme, already includes non-revenue water reduction. That work should be expanded and protected from the familiar cycle of short term funding.
There is also a case for asking those who consume water extravagantly to contribute more to the repair of the public network. Hotels, water parks, commercial swimming pools and other leisure facilities should face a modest, transparent surcharge with every rupee ringfenced for leak remediation and wastewater management. This is not an attack on tourism; tourism is vital to the economy. But businesses that depend on large volumes of treated water should help finance the resilience of the system they rely on.
The same principle should apply to major commercial developments. New hotels, factories, apartment complexes and shopping centres should be required to install water efficient fixtures, rainwater harvesting, stormwater management, real-time monitoring and on site reuse systems as a condition of approval. Such requirements should not be treated as optional corporate social responsibility; they should be standard planning rules.
Make reuse normal, not exceptional
Sri Lanka has long behaved as though water is used once and then discarded. That model is no longer defensible. Large institutions should be required to treat and reuse wastewater for non-drinking purposes such as toilet flushing, landscaping, cooling systems and cleaning. Treated wastewater must meet Central Environmental Authority standards and regulators must have the staff and laboratories to enforce those standards. But the principle is straightforward: clean drinking water should not be used carelessly for tasks that do not require it.
Rainwater harvesting should be revived and modernised too. In an island where intense rainfall can overwhelm drains and cause floods, capturing water at the household, commercial and community level is both a supply measure and a flood-management strategy.
The benefits are especially clear in cities. Colombo and other urban areas are expanding rapidly, covering soil with concrete and pushing water away through drainage systems rather than allowing it to recharge the ground. Green roofs, permeable paving, retention ponds and urban wetlands are not decorative luxuries; they are parts of a water system.
This is where the temptation to frame environmental regulation as an obstacle to growth must be resisted. A hotel that recycles water, a factory that prevents pollution and a housing project that captures rainfall are not burdens on the economy. They are investments in its survival.
The sea offers an opportunity, with strict limits
There is one area where commercial water production could have a legitimate place: desalination. Unlike freshwater drawn from rivers, tanks or aquifers, desalinated seawater is a manufactured product. It is created through technology, energy and capital. If managed carefully, it can supplement supplies in water-stressed coastal areas and reduce pressure on freshwater reserves.
Sri Lanka’s location on major shipping routes also creates a possible market for marine water supply. A Sri Lanka Water Exchange could serve ships, aviation services and premium bottled water markets, potentially generating foreign exchange. That idea should be approached with scepticism but not dismissed outright.
The crucial safeguard is that desalinated water must remain separate from natural freshwater. No project should be allowed to use the promise of exports as a back door to groundwater extraction or the diversion of rivers. Export licences should apply only to genuine surplus production after domestic needs, agricultural requirements and drought reserves have been met.
Environmental standards are equally important. Desalination can be energy intensive and can damage marine ecosystems if concentrated brine is discharged carelessly. Projects should therefore use the cleanest feasible technology, assess marine impacts independently and, where possible, link production to renewable energy.
The test is simple. Does a desalination project increase Sri Lanka’s resilience without weakening public control over freshwater? If it does, it may have a place. If it becomes another mechanism for private interests to capture a public resource, it should be rejected.
The oldest answer may still be the best
Sri Lanka does not need to invent its water wisdom from scratch. It already has one of the world’s most sophisticated historical systems of water management: the tank cascade. In the dry zone, networks of small reservoirs were designed not as isolated ponds but as interconnected ecological systems. They stored water, trapped sediment, recharged groundwater, supported biodiversity and sustained agriculture through seasonal change. The kulu wewa trapped silt upstream; the olgamuwa supported cultivation in one season and wildlife in another. These were not crude relics. They were landscape scale technologies built around the reality of scarcity.
IWMI estimates that Sri Lanka has more than 1,200 viable cascade systems as well as between 1,500 and 2,000 neglected or underused tanks. Restoring them should be a central climate-adaptation programme, not a heritage side project.
But restoration must go beyond repairing bunds and dredging tanks. It must revive collective management. Traditional practices such as bethma, the equitable sharing of irrigated land and water during shortages, hold lessons for a future in which fairness will matter as much as engineering.
Communities should be given a meaningful role in catchment plans, tank maintenance and decisions about local land use. Women, small farmers and marginalised groups must be represented, because they often bear the greatest burden when taps run dry or crops fail.
There is no contradiction between satellite data and ancient water systems. Sri Lanka needs both. It needs meteorological forecasts, aquifer mapping, smart meters and climate modelling. It also needs the patience and ecological intelligence embedded in its historic landscapes.
A choice that cannot be postponed
Sri Lanka’s water future will not be decided by one policy document, one foreign investor or one drought. It will be shaped by hundreds of decisions: whether a leaking pipe is repaired, whether a wetland is protected, whether a luxury development recycles its wastewater, whether an aquifer is monitored, whether a farmer has a voice and whether parliament treats water as a public trust. The central principle should be non-negotiable. Natural freshwater is not for sale.
That does not mean refusing technology, investment or international cooperation. It means setting terms. It means using desalination where it genuinely adds supply, enforcing efficiency where water is wasted, restoring traditional systems where they strengthen resilience and building institutions capable of acting before crises become disasters. The fight over water is often presented as a question of price. In reality, it is a question of power.
Sri Lanka can choose a future in which water is managed as a shared foundation for life, livelihoods and ecological security or it can allow scarcity, fragmentation and financial pressure to turn it into another asset controlled by the few. For an island whose civilisation was built around water, the choice should be clear.
