The United Russia Party is making a commotion over the water problem, and it wants to do something drastic. The first United Russia member to raise the issue was none other than Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who famously published a book about reversing the course of rivers. The State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov then picked up the slack, proposing a clean water project on behalf of his party. Their efforts were not in vain.
On instructions from the party's leader, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade drafted the new Clean Water Programme and submitted it to the government. The fact that it has the prime minister's approval has put the legislation on a fast track. Even before Putin signed the Clean Water Programme, the agencies that will be responsible for implementing it were officially registered in the Consolidated State Register of Legal Entities.
On December 4th of last year, Putin signed a resolution that allowed the non-commercial partnership, Russian Water Company, to use the words "Russia" and "Russian Federation" in its name; the partnership was subsequently entered in the registry as early as December 24. The primary founder of the company is the Petersburg water management authority Vodokanal Sankt Peterburga. The Petersburg connection is crucial.
Meanwhile, the allocations made to the Clean Water programme impress even the old-timers at the Finance Ministry: the federal budget will dish out 20 billion roubles a year for eight consecutive years until 2017. That is a hefty slice of government resources for any single programme. Even President Dmitry Medvedev's Modernisation Commission received only half that sum for its projects. Following simple arithmetic, then, the modernisation of the entire country is projected at only half the cost of improving the quality of drinking water.
The president, however, is no stranger to the water theme. Along with Clean Water, he has issued instructions to prepare a federal targeted programme to preserve the environment of Lake Baikal. True, the Ministry of Natural Resources was not as quick as the Ministry of Economic Development and has not yet prepared a draft of the programme or its concept. But for party functionaries, water promises to be a much more lucrative topic, if not a more fashionable one, than modernisation and innovations.
Yevgeniya Pismennaya