Iran International
An Iranian lawmaker said price-based water policies risk serving as fiscal stopgaps rather than tackling the country’s chronic shortages, urging non-price reforms and stricter controls on water-intensive industry placement before any tariff overhaul.
“In practice, administrations use pricing policies merely to cover budget deficits and may claim they want to develop renewable resources, while this has appeared in six development plans and has not been implemented,” Reza Sepahvand, a senior member of parliament’s energy committee, said in a roundtable discussion carried by Iranian media.
Sepahvand said political and commercial interference has pushed water policy off approved tracks, channeling investment into ill-suited mega-projects and heavy industry in arid regions and aggravating tensions between provinces and farmers. “What forces have pushed the country off the proper path of water management?” he questioned.
He cited the clustering of steel pellet plants around Ardakan in Yazd – a central desert region – and long-running fights over piping water from one region to another as choices that worsen shortages.
The debate comes as experts blame decades of over-extraction, unchecked urban growth and placing water-hungry industries in the desert – alongside drier weather – for pushing groundwater sources and lakes to the brink.
They say lasting fixes require enforcing ecological limits, curbing groundwater pumping, and shifting money from large dams and pipelines to watershed restoration and reuse.
Tariffs miss the real drain
Investigative journalist Amirhadi Anvari told Iran International that raising prices would make little difference and will be marginal at best.
“Iran uses more than 90% of its water in agriculture. The share of municipal drinking water is estimated at 6% to 8%, and industry at 2% to 3%. In these circumstances, changing the price of urban and industrial water will not make much difference.”
He said the core problem is not household behavior but the policy model guiding farms, arguing that the agriculture model is driven by ideology, not resource limits.
“The important point about the agriculture sector is that it is ideological. All top-level policy documents, laws and development plans under both leaders of the Islamic Republic – Khomeini and Khamenei – have been built on self-sufficiency.”
Anvari links self-sufficiency to expansion of irrigated farming despite dwindling supplies.
“To achieve food self-sufficiency, you must expand the cultivated area. Many of Iran’s rain-fed fields... have now been turned into irrigated lands. This was not the choice of farmers; it was an ideological program of the Islamic Republic’s leaders.”
Profiteering derails reforms
Mehdi Zare, a scientist who has studied environmental risk and infrastructure, said during the same roundtable that short-term interests across the system have repeatedly overridden sound planning.
“All of this has beneficiaries – from users to those who influence studies and decisions,” he said. “Unless we establish an order that can restrain short-term gains, stakeholders can bend trajectories and prevent the situation from reaching equilibrium.”
Zare warned that bias can creep in even at high-level policy meetings, shaping outcomes on issues such as securing Lake Urmia’s water rights, limiting new wells around Tehran, or managing migration to the capital region.
“Advisers may be top experts, but if they have a bias, they can guide decisions so that, for example, the priority is not the lake’s environmental flow or reducing extra abstraction,” he said.
Other specialists in the event echoed calls to sequence reforms. They argued that real-world pricing only works alongside non-price measures such as clearer water rights, enforcement, modern irrigation and industrial recycling, particularly calling for transparency on where revenue goes.
They also questioned utilities’ reliance on water sales to fund operations, saying the model creates pressure to sell more rather than conserve.
Sepahvand said policy should curb politically driven megaprojects and re-orient investment toward groundwater recharge and watershed management, adding that any tariff rises should follow – not replace – structural fixes.
The experts in the event, however, cautioned that without governance changes to insulate water decisions from narrow interests, higher bills alone will neither restore depleted aquifers nor ease tensions between regions competing for dwindling supplies.
