Leong Ching, Straits Times 2 Dec 08;
BY HIS own admission, Mr Ek Sonn Chan is an unlikely hero. In the 1970s as Cambodia emerged from the devastation the Khmer Rouge inflicted on the country, he was a low-profile civil servant in an obscure department working on the city's electricity grid.
He was alone in the world - the Pol Pot regime had killed all his family. He survived, he said, by keeping his head down.
Then in 1993, after the United Nations-sponsored elections, he found new a new mission. As the director of Phnom Penh's Water Supply Authority (PPWSA), he turned the city's yellow, muddy trickle of water into a clear, steady stream.
At the time, only one-fifth of the city had access to the city's 280km of cast iron pipes.
Water flowed for only 10 hours a day and half of it was lost through leaks. Most of the pipes were 70 years old.
There was almost no formal way to be connected to the city's water supply. You had to fork out US$1,000 (S$1,500) to US$5,000 to buy the favour of water officials. If you were poor, you bought water one tepid jar at a time, and tried to make it last.
Some 15 years later, you can drink straight from the tap in Phnom Penh. Almost everyone has access to water 24 hours a day. Out of 100 drops, only six are allowed to leak away. Singapore loses four, while some utilities in Britain lose as many as 10.
Last year, Mr Chan received Asia's Nobel Prize - the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service.
At 59, he remains a tiger of a man, tanned and vigorous. An avid golfer, he still hits 270 yards with his driver on a good day, he told me.
You are a tough man, who did a tough job, I tell him.
He shrugs. 'I saw the people, I saw their need. You can't deny water to someone because he is poor. That gave me the courage to do what was needed,' he says.
He tells of the time when he went to the home of a powerful army general to tell him that he needed to install a water meter in his home. Until then, the general had been paying a flat rate, using as much water as he liked.
'I talked to his deputy first, and he seemed to agree. So my men started digging. But then the general came out, and put a gun to my head. 'Stop now,' he said. I turned around and all my men had run away. So I said, 'Ok, we stop'.
'The next day, I hired some armed militia men. Eight of us went to the house, disconnected his water supply. The general lived without water for a few days. Eventually, he came to see me in my office, and he allowed us to put the meter in,' he says.
Prof Tommy Koh, the chairman of the Asia Pacific Forum, calls Mr Chan 'my personal water hero'. This sounds like hyperbole but it isn't.
One in five people in Asia do not have access to safe drinking water, and half do not have proper sanitation. Waterborne diseases are widespread.
Last week, Mr Chan was in Singapore as part of an executive programme organised by the Institute of Water Policy at the National University of Singapore, to help countries solve their water problems.
Twenty people representing water utilities and companies all over the developing world were here for two weeks to learn how to reduce leaks, to control demand, to get people to accept that recycled water is safe to drink.
Singapore's role in this large and humane mission is to put the pieces together: To connect Mr Chan with Mr Iihom Djalalov of Uzbekistan, Mr Vu Phong of Vietnam and Mr Aleksandr Margaryan of Armenia; to share its own water story, and to spread the successful lessons of others whose rivers have found their own way to the sea.
There are times in history when one man like Mr Chan can make a difference.
The writer, a former Straits Times journalist, is a PhD candidate at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS.
