Turned Off: GWI’s Five-Region Disconnection Campaign and the Regulatory Order Nobody Can Confirm Was Followed

 Turned Off: GWI’s Five-Region Disconnection Campaign and the Regulatory Order Nobody Can Confirm Was Followed

OPINION BY: Staff Writer — The 592 Guardian

As Guyana Water Inc. prepares to cut service house-to-house across Regions 3, 4, 6 and 10 this week, a 2022 regulatory order meant to guarantee due process and public reporting appears to have gone unmonitored — and neither the utility nor its regulator can say why.

Beginning August 10, Guyana Water Inc. (GWI) will send crews house-to-house through Georgetown, East Bank Demerara, East Coast Demerara, West Coast/West Bank Demerara and parts of Region Six, disconnecting customers with outstanding balances. The five-day campaign, publicised through a series of regional notices, covers dozens of named communities — from Alberttown and Kitty in the capital to Corriverton-Dukestown on the Corentyne — and arrives with a single instruction to residents: settle up, or lose water.

The notices are silent on a set of protections that GWI’s own regulator ordered into place nearly four years ago. In September 2022, following a formal challenge from the Guyana Consumers Association, the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) issued Order 2 of 2022, upholding GWI’s disputed $7,500 reconnection fee but attaching conditions: a longer disconnection-notice period, a higher grace threshold before cutoff, a directive to review disconnection methods for cost-effectiveness, and — critically — a requirement that GWI file monthly reports to the PUC disclosing how many customers were disconnected, their outstanding balances, the methods used, and reconnection figures.

A related metering order set a December 2024 deadline for 100% metering of previously unmetered consumers, with quarterly progress reports due along the way.

The 592 Guardian sought to determine whether either compliance stream — the monthly disconnection reports or the metering updates — has actually been filed, and whether the 24-hour notice and $12,500 grace threshold set in 2022 are being honoured in this week’s campaign.

Neither GWI nor the PUC could provide a definitive answer. Both pointed, in substance, to an ongoing transition to digital systems.

THE 2022 ORDER: A REAL CONCESSION, WITH STRINGS ATTACHED

The 2022 proceeding is worth recalling in full, because it complicates any simple narrative of a state utility acting with impunity. Dr. Yog Mahadeo, appearing for the Guyana Consumers Association, argued before the Commission that GWI’s disconnection practices should be reconsidered altogether, invoking UN General Assembly Resolution 64/292 — the 2010 recognition of water as a human right — and pressing the Commission to review what he characterised as a punitive reconnection fee.

GWI’s then-CEO, Shaik Baksh, defended the fee on financial grounds, telling the Commission that the utility’s actual disconnection and reconnection costs already exceeded what the $7,500 charge recovered, and that a 2021 customer-assistance programme waiving half the fee had not achieved its intended effect and was discontinued.

The Commission’s ruling split the difference. It upheld the $7,500 fee — finding it did not exceed GWI’s own recovery costs — but it did not treat the matter as closed. Effective January 1, 2023, GWI was ordered to raise its credit/grace limit from $10,000 to $12,500, extend disconnection notice from four hours to twenty-four, review its disconnection methods, and submit monthly disaggregated reports to the PUC on every disconnection: who, why, how much was owed, how the cutoff was carried out, and when — if ever — service was restored.

“The fee was never defied. It was reviewed, and upheld, by the regulator — with a paper trail attached. The open question is what happened to that paper trail.”

That reporting requirement is the piece of Order 2 that matters most for this week’s campaign. It exists precisely so that a mass disconnection drive like the one now underway in five regions could be checked against a public record — how many households are losing water, whether vulnerable customers are among them, and whether the 24-hour notice and $12,500 threshold are being applied. In November 2023, GWI itself filed for a review of aspects of Order 2; the substance of that filing and its outcome are not available in the PUC’s public archive.

A COMPLIANCE TRAIL THAT GOES COLD

The PUC’s website lists dedicated pages for Monthly Reports, Annual Reports, and PUC Orders — the exact mechanism through which GWI’s obligations under Order 2 would be made public.     As of this reporting, none of those pages show content past early 2024; the Commission’s own news and orders listings likewise thin out around February 2024.

Whether that reflects a genuine gap in filings, a backlog in publishing filings that exist, or simply a website not being maintained is not something that can be determined from the public record alone.

The 592 Guardian put the question directly to both institutions:    ♦ Has GWI filed the monthly disconnection reports required since January 2023?

♦ Was the December 2024 metering deadline met, and were the required quarterly progress reports submitted?

♦ Is the 24-hour notice period, and the $12,500 grace threshold, being applied in the current five-region campaign?

Neither GWI nor the PUC provided a definitive answer to any of the three questions. The explanation offered, in substance, was that both institutions are in the midst of a transition to digital record-keeping systems, and that the requested data was not readily retrievable in the interim.

AN EXCUSE THAT PREDATES THE DEADLINE IT’S MISSING

That explanation does not sit comfortably against the government’s own digitisation timeline. President Irfaan Ali announced in September 2025 that most government services would be fully digitised by the end of the second quarter of 2026 — a deadline that has now passed. The obligations in question, moreover, are not digital-transformation projects. They are statutory reporting duties created by a regulatory order issued in 2022, with a first report due in January 2023 — twenty months before the digitisation programme was even announced, and well before any system upgrade could plausibly explain their absence.

If a national digitisation push that was supposed to conclude in June is now the reason a state utility and its own regulator cannot confirm compliance with a nearly four-year-old order, that is itself a finding: it suggests either the digitisation programme has slipped its own deadline without public acknowledgment, or — more troublingly — that the underlying compliance gap predates any system transition and the digitisation explanation has become a ready-made answer for record-keeping failures that were already occurring.

WHAT THE HUMAN RIGHTS STANDARD ACTUALLY REQUIRES

It is tempting, watching a disconnection notice reach this many communities at once, to reach immediately for the language of a human rights violation. The international standard is more precise than that, and worth stating accurately.

The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, in its General Comment No. 15 on the right to water, holds that where disconnection follows non-payment, a customer’s capacity to pay must be taken into account, and that no one may be deprived of the minimum essential level of water regardless of ability to pay. Arbitrary or unjustified disconnection — as distinct from disconnection that follows due process and preserves a minimum supply — is what the Committee identifies as a violation.

On that standard, GWI’s public-facing materials are not, on their face, out of step: the utility’s own FAQ describes disconnection as a last resort after non-payment and points customers toward negotiated payment arrangements before cutoff. The 2022 PUC order, likewise, built in real procedural protections — more notice, a higher grace threshold, mandated reporting.

The gap is not in the written policy. It is in the absence of any current, checkable evidence that the policy’s own safeguards are being followed during a campaign of this scale.

QUESTIONS ON THE RECORD

The 592 Guardian is publishing this piece with those questions unresolved, rather than waiting on institutions that have not been able to answer them.

We put the following to GWI and the PUC and will update this record as responses are received:

1. Have GWI’s monthly disconnection reports, required under Order 2 of 2022 since January 2023, been filed with the PUC for every month since that date? If any months are missing, which, and why?
2. Was the December 3, 2024 deadline for 100% metering of unmetered consumers met? If not, what is the current metering completion rate, and were the required quarterly progress reports filed?
3. In the disconnection campaign now underway across Regions 3, 4, 6 and 10, is the 24-hour notice period and the $12,500 grace threshold set by Order 2 being applied to every household disconnected?
4. Does GWI screen for vulnerable households — elderly, disabled, or health-dependent customers — before disconnection, and if so, under what published policy?
5. What was the substance and outcome of GWI’s November 2023 application to review Order 2 of 2022?
6. When will the PUC’s Monthly Reports and Annual Reports archives be updated to reflect filings, if any, made since early 2024?

WHY THIS MATTERS NOW

Guyana’s disconnection framework is not, on paper, indifferent to hardship. It has a regulator that has intervened before, a fee structure the Commission has scrutinised, and reporting requirements designed to make mass campaigns like this one auditable rather than opaque. What appears to be missing is not the rule but its enforcement — or, at minimum, the public evidence that enforcement is occurring. A five-region disconnection drive is precisely the moment that evidence should be easiest to produce. That it is not says less about whether GWI’s policy meets the human rights standard on paper, and more about whether Guyana’s regulatory institutions can currently show their own work.

In a season defined by El Niño’s scorching heat and parched communities, GWI’s mass disconnection campaign is more than administrative overreach; it is a chilling indictment of how far removed our decision-makers have become from the lived reality of ordinary Guyanese.

To cut water in the middle of a climate crisis is not just poor judgment, it is an act that flirts with cruelty, stripping families of the most basic means of survival while mouthing clichés about “management” and “efficiency.”

This campaign reveals a system that punishes instead of protects, one that treats water as a bill to be chased rather than a lifeline to be safeguarded.

If this is how we govern in the face of El Niño, then the real drought we face is one of empathy, accountability, and common sense—and that disconnect is more dangerous than any dry spell.

The 592 Guardian sought comment from Guyana Water Inc. and the Public Utilities Commission prior to publication. This report will be updated with any response received.

— The Board