BISHKEK -- Azhar Amanova, a pensioner living on the southern outskirts of the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, has had enough.
For more than a week, her neighborhood of Archa Beshik had depended on modest rations of water distributed from a tanker once a day.
It was enough to drink in small amounts and wash a few dishes, but not to bathe.
On a visit to Amanova's home on June 6, the temperature had reached nearly 36 degrees Celsius. Last week alone, Bishkek broke records on four straight days for its daytime highs since such temperatures were first recorded early in the previous century.
"They say that Kyrgyzstan is a water-rich country, but where is this wealth?" Amanova asked during an interview last week with Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.
"What kind of life is this? Tell the officials...to turn the water on," she fumed.
Anger In Kazakhstan's Astana, Aqtau
Acute water shortages have become increasingly common in Central Asia, posing a long-term food-security threat to a region where agriculture plays a vital role in national economies.
But in terms of urban settings, Bishkek is one of several major Central Asian cities where the future is arriving earlier than expected, intensifying criticism of officials' management of groundwater supplies that are vulnerable to summertime plunges.
Last week in the Kazakh capital, Astana, local media shared footage of a water tanker racing in the direction of the glitzy Expo district, pointing to the depth of the water crisis in a city associated with massive state investments into vanity projects.
Small protests over water shutoffs in Astana began as early as last month, while last week residents of two apartment buildings in the city blocked a road to demand water as an unusually fierce heat wave struck the city.
Confronting the angry citizens, a city official said his own family was "washing according to the schedule," which had seen the water supply limited to just a few hours during the night, RFE/RL's Kazakh Service reported.
Astana's population of over 1.3 million is growing by about 50,000-60,000 per year, and water-related infrastructure is not keeping pace.
Municipal authorities have acknowledged that this growth is faster than anticipated and have pledged to build new pumping and filtering stations to accommodate rising demand.
A Kazakh city that regularly suffers summertime water deficits is the Caspian Sea city of Aqtau, which draws its water from the giant salt lake that Kazakhstan shares with Azerbaijan, Iran, Russia, and Turkmenistan.
On June 7, Aqtau's city hall declared a state of emergency over the Caspian, noting a significant recession of the Kazakh section of its shoreline, although officials said that there were so far no problems with the water supply and that shutoffs in Aqtau were connected instead to infrastructure repairs.
Gulmira Nietkali, co-founder of the Association of Practicing Ecologists and an Aqtau resident, told RFE/RL that pressures on the Caspian come from "geographical, political, social, and climatic factors," with falling intake from rivers flowing from the lake's littoral states and the expansion of industry complementing higher rates of evaporation as summers get hotter.
But beyond that, there are questions about water use in towns like Aqtau, a former Soviet closed town devoted to the uranium industry that was "not supposed to be somewhere where people lived indefinitely," Nietkali said.
"Now we have a growing population that is using more water because incomes have grown, too, and at the same time as that is happening, there are car washes using water that should be going into residential homes for drinking. I have raised this issue many times," he added, noting that officials are reluctant to raise water tariffs, as they fear that doing so could irritate the population even more than supply interruptions.
Bishkek's Bans
Car washes are one of the institutions that have been temporarily shut down by the authorities in Bishkek, along with bathhouses and swimming pools.
The government has also raided residents of private homes to check that hoses are not being used to water gardens, where people typically grow fruit and vegetables to eat or sell.
Neighborhoods across the southern half of the city have been receiving water this month only at nighttime in most cases.
In the Kyrgyz parliament, several lawmakers called on the government to prioritize the construction and repair of water infrastructure, which is both insufficient for a city of about 1 million and in many cases badly out of date.
Lawmaker Janar Akaev warned on June 8 that Bishkek was turning into a "big village" as the government sank money into government programs and state-funded corporations, one of which -- in the mining sector -- has since been liquidated.
His colleague, Marlen Mamataliev, complained that the cabinet had dawdled on a request from Bishkek municipal authorities to allocate 100 million soms (about $1.2 million) and four tracts of land for new water-intake structures.
"Yesterday we approved the allocation of 10 billion soms ($120 million) for capital investments. Can't we find even 100 million soms?" he asked.
Officials have said the slow runoff from glaciers this spring has provoked a critical drop in the water table, but they expect the situation to normalize within a month. Ecologists also point to low precipitation in February and March as a factor that has led to less groundwater.
But for some observers, the Kyrgyz capital's water deficit is just a symptom of a wider approach to governance.
In a commentary for the private Kyrgyz website 24.kg, journalist Yuri Kopytin noted that deep problems with irrigation canals and other water infrastructure "did not appear yesterday...but built up over the years."
"By tradition, officials first bring the situation to a critical state and then try to solve it with unpopular methods," he wrote.
