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I am reading an interesting book called 'The Last Fools'. It is a chronicle of the civil servants who worked alongside Lee Kuan Yew. Some of them turned ministers.
The mainstream narrative around Singapore's transformation revolves around the brilliance, doggedness and foresight of Lee Kuan Yew. But I was always curious about the people around him. The ones who had to implement the ideas. I've read about Rajaratnam and a couple of other ministers. I found this book in Singapore. It profiles eight civil servants. A good starting point.
This piece is about Lee Ek Tieng. Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Environment. His 'CV' includes cleaning up Singapore's rivers, setting up an elaborate sewage and drainwater system, and building the water recycling system that turns Singapore's drainage into potable water.
Singapore's rivers were in hideous shape through the 1960s. Chemicals, pig refuse, dead animals, human waste. A deadly mix that had rendered the Kallang and the Singapore River unusable and killed most aquatic life.
Tieng headed the effort to clear out the riverside. Relocate the industries. Relocate the people. They desilted one metre of sludge and replaced it with pristine river sand from Indonesia. And they made sure every source of pollution stayed shut.
Once the sources were cut, the smell was gone within a week. The river was not sick. It was being poisoned. Ten years went into stopping the poisoning. The dredging was one operation. It took a great deal of political and bureaucratic will to ensure the sources of pollution were permanently shut.
He also put in place the mechanism to drain rainwater into the rivers and reservoirs. A precursor to weaning Singapore off Malaysian water.
The agreement with Malaysia was a tenuous one given the unease between the two countries. Treating urban stormwater as a precious resource to sock away in reservoirs was a foresighted move. Building the mechanisms for it was the smart move.
Same goes for recycling sewage into potable water. Singapore played the wait and watch game. They tried it in the 1970s and shelved it because the membranes were too expensive. Then they waited. When filtration got affordable, they pounced on the technology and made it work for their context. Twenty-five years between the shelving and the pouncing.
Tieng seems like a beloved, unassuming and brilliant engineer. He played the long game well. Water recycling, desalination, drainage. He plugged away at all of it for years.
The big picture. A city-state like Singapore is the result of many brilliant minds plugging away at things for decades without ever taking their eye off the ball.
Madras has three rivers. The Buckingham Canal alone takes sixty percent of the untreated sewage this city produces every day. The Cooum takes thirty. The Adyar takes ten. We set aside money to dredge them year after year. Nobody will stop the pollution going in.