Ever since former World Bank Vice-President Ismail Serageldin famously declared that the next world war would be fought over water rather than oil, the impending scarcity of this precious resource has gripped public imagination. In reality, Serageldin was guilty of exaggeration since conflicts over water, typically, build up over a long period and do not turn into flashpoints unlike in the case of oil. Nevertheless, the spectre of a world without sufficient drinking water continues to loom large. One of the UN's millennium development goals is to halve, by 2015, the number of people currently without access to safe drinking water (estimated at 1.2 billion people). Globally, the consumption of water is doubling every 25 years, at more than twice the rate of population growth. And recurring droughts remind everyone that water is literally a matter of life or death.