The employees of PPI are feeling insecure about their jobs as the contract ends in February.

WASA board, in a meeting on February 19, has formed a sub-committee headed by Professor Dr Firoz Ahmed from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) to evaluate the feasibility of PPI. The committee is due to submit its report in mid April.

Among the eight revenue zones of Dhaka WASA, PPI is responsible for billing and revenue collection of zone 3, 4 and 5 where they have succeeded in downsizing the 'system loss' to 26 per cent against the target of 30 percent earning over Tk 132 crores in the year 2005-06.

On the contrary, system loss in other five zones run by Dhaka WASA itself is 43 per cent. Revenue collection in these zones totalled to only Tk 95 crore 48 lakh.

"They (WASA) had been signing contracts with us for three months at a time. This has been going on since July last year. We cannot make any future plan about the billing system because of this short-term contracts", said Aftab Ahmed, chairman of PPI.

"We have successfully completed all our task according to the current terms and conditions. I don't see why our contract will not be renewed", he added.

In 1997, Dhaka WASA introduced partial privatisation of billing and revenue collection with a goal to improving its efficiency.

It was a precondition of the World Bank credit of $ 80.3 million for the Fourth Dhaka Water Supply Project.

Due to a strong resistance and pressure from the WASA employees' union against privatisation, WASA decided to contract out one zone to a private firm and the other to Employees' Multi-purpose Co-operative on a trial basis for a period of one year.

The project was codenamed Programme for Performance Improvement.

It was also decided that after one year, the model used by the most successful party would be adopted as the model for billing and revenue collection.

Since the employees union was the successful party, they were given the responsibility of billing and revenue collection in revenue zones 4 and 5 at first. Due to their good performance, PPI was given the responsibility of zone 3 as well in September 2003.

Currently, PPI has a total number of 1.24 lakh consumers under these three zones.

The WASA authorities could not explain why the project was not being continued.

"To survive the future load, Dhaka WASA must improve its performance and it must curb system loss. Before taking any decision, we are evaluating the situation right now", said Shahidur Rahman Pradhan, managing director of Dhaka WASA, admitting the fact that PPI so far has been proven to be a very efficient method.

"It was the precondition of World Bank to improve the performance of WASA. PPI was the most successful party so far. There is no reason for them to discontinue PPI", said Ahmed.

Meanwhile, among the 3,700 employees at Dhaka WASA, 200 employees of PPI are uncertain about their jobs. If PPI is discontinued, they have to return to Dhaka WASA -- where the salary is one-third of that at PPI.

"The reason PPI succeeded in curbing corruption in its three zones is we paid higher wages to our employees", Ahmed mentioned.

Before the introduction of PPI, a WASA billing investigator would only get Tk 5,000 as salary. Under the policy to curb corruption, PPI increased the salary to Tk 12,000 with two festival bonuses and one incentive bonus.

The workers efficiency has improved under PPI as well. For example, same metre reader who used to prepare only 250 bills a month now prepares 800 bills under PPI.

Buying out the integrity of the metre readers was the strategy of PPI that became known as the 'Dhaka Model' in the international community.

PPI was highly praised in the 3rd World Water Forum 2003 held in Kyoto, Japan.