Dimas Siregar – For years, the residents of Muara Baru, North Jakarta, have had to rely on vendors selling drinking water door to door at inflated prices.

The vendors are often referred to as the water mafia, taking advantage of the lack of a clean water supply in the area, but they say what they do is completely legal.

Vendor Rusdi said he usually sold a jerrycan of clean water for Rp 1,000. "But if it's drier than usual, I can sell them for Rp 2,500," he said.

Rusdi, who began selling water in the area in 1988, gets his supply from a veteran trader called Mailang Rari. He said Mailang was a "legal water trader" licensed by municipal water operator PAM.

Mailang reportedly controls a hydrant, complete with its own security guard, from which anyone can get water for Rp 3,500 a cubic meter, payable directly to the PAM office in North Jakarta.

Among those who buy from him are vendors like Rusdi. "I'm pretty certain Mailang's legit because he's been selling water since I was a child," Rusdi says.

Fellow trader Herman Felando also says Mailang's operation is legitimate, saying he once had a sign outside his house attesting to his appointment by PAM. "But the sign was stolen a while back," Herman says.

But Muhammad Reza Sahib, from the People's Coalition for Water Rights (Kruha), said it was illegal for vendors to sell water. He said a governor's decree stipulated that the sale of water from a hydrant was illegal if the hydrant was in an area served by a water network.

"This practice has gone on in Muara Baru for years, and the government continues to ignore it," Reza said. "Their attitude is ambiguous. The sale of water is burdening people unfairly."

He said water was a basic need and as such its distribution should never be monopolized but regulated by the government. "The deal between the government-run PAM and the private operator PAM Lyonnaise Jaya [Palyja] to supply water to the area 12 years ago is a failure," he said.

Palyja should be transparent in reporting its operations and PAM should notify the private operator about its hydrant sales. This would help rid Muara Baru of it extortionist water vendors, Reza said.

Palyja spokeswoman Meyritha Maryanie said the hydrants and the practice of selling water from them had been in place long before the company was established. She said it was aware of the violations but some people in Muara Baru treated the hydrants as their own property, making it difficult to resolve the problem.

"The residents of Muara Baru need clean water every day," she said. "Some unscrupulous individuals there believe the hydrants are theirs and that they are entitled to sell the water from them."

Meyritha said Palyja was working with PAM and the Jakarta administration to draft a regulation on use of the hydrants.

She also said the company was carrying out a public awareness campaign, but to little effect. Palyja could simply shut off the water to the hydrants, but such a confrontational approach would not serve anyone's interests.

"We want to avoid any kind of conflict with the Muara Baru residents, and that's why we're trying to approach them through a campaign," Meyritha said.

The company had cut off water to several hydrants in area served by a mains network but there was a concerted effort by "hydrant thugs" to prevent anyone else from subscribing to Palyja's network. "Even our officers out in the field are intimidated by them," Meyritha said.'

PAM regulatory agency (BR PAM) spokesman Irzal Djamal said water sales did not fall under his office's jurisdiction.