What it is like being a Mentor for the Asian Development Bank’s Water Organization Partnership for Resilience programme (WOP4R), with Mr. Ong Tze Ch’in, Chief Executive, PUB

[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange, 15 minute podcasts where a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, educate, and inform other water sector leaders from around the globe. My name is Piers Clark and my guest today is Ong Tze Ch'in, the chief executive of PUB Public Utilities Board, the water company that serves the nation of Singapore.
[00:00:20] Piers Clark: Tze Ch'in it is wonderful to have you with me.
[00:00:22] Ong Tze Ch'in: Thank you. Always a pleasure, Piers.
[00:00:24] Piers Clark: You kindly were on number eight of our podcast, anyone wants to listen to that, you can go back and hear that.
[00:00:30] Piers Clark: But today we're actually going to be talking in particular about the mentoring program that PUB's been involved with. But before we get to that, we want people to know a little bit more about you. And when you last spoke to me we talked about your background. We talked about the fact that you'd had 25 years in a military career, and then you'd joined the public surface in 2018.
[00:00:49] Ong Tze Ch'in: That's right.
[00:00:50] Piers Clark: and then you've been with PUB for the last one and a half years. Well, my question to you is, knowing that background, knowing that you've had a long career in the military, followed by a fairly substantial career now in public service, what skills have you been able to bring to the public service that were honed while you were having your military career.
[00:01:08] Ong Tze Ch'in: Thanks for that question, Piers. So first of all, to be honest, in Singapore, the military is considered to be part of the public service. So in many ways the processes, the way we deal with issues, how we surface issues to administer very simple.
[00:01:21] Ong Tze Ch'in: And so process wise, the transition wasn't too hard. It's fairly similar across, but I think the thing I bring the most across to the public service when I transitioned out was two things. One, this very strong sense of leadership a leadership skill that should hold through many years of commanding units through the Army.
[00:01:37] Ong Tze Ch'in: And the second is instinct for operations, running operation, dealing with emergency responses, crisis management. And I'll tell you from time to time, shit happens.
[00:01:47] Piers Clark: Thank you for that. And of course, it's a perfect lead to my next question, Everybody knows about PUB. Everyone understands the scale and size and leadership thoughts that come from PUB, but what we often don't talk about is the very fact that in Singapore, the nation of Singapore's importance of water was set by the founder by Lee Kuan Yew. Could you just expand that story so that people who don't know the background can just get a bit of a sense as to where the water journey started for Singapore.
[00:02:13] Ong Tze Ch'in: Well, this year we marked 60 years of independence for Singapore. You have to think b ack to a Singapore that 60 years ago, very different from the Singapore that many of you would know today. I think at post independent Singapore, water was an existential issue, right?
[00:02:26] Ong Tze Ch'in: We had just separated away from Malaysia and part of the separation agreement was the guarantee of the water agreements that we had in Malaysia And at that point in time, I would say more than half, I think almost three quarters, if not, of our water supply came from Malaysia.
[00:02:40] Ong Tze Ch'in: Very little of it was i n Singapore. And so Mr. Lee, as the Prime Minister, well understood this concern and made water a central policy to Singapore's government. And with that, we needed to do very, very innovative and drastic things. NEWater being one of them. But I think the other one that people don't know so much about is how we make every raindrop count.
[00:03:00] Ong Tze Ch'in: We make two thirds of the country, two thirds of the city catchment area that we capture every bit of rainwater channel into reservoirs from three reservoirs. We have 17 now. It's a huge journey.
[00:03:11] Piers Clark: I love the idea that it was 60 years ago that Singapore was formed, and here we are essentially three generations on and still that passion and importance for water is seen throughout the country. Well, let's come now to the main topic we're going to talk about. So we are recording this in Manila at the Asian Development Bank's Water Forum. And one of the things we are showcasing at this forum is the mentoring program that's been set up.
[00:03:37] Piers Clark: And PUB has been one of the mentors supporting some of the other utilities. Can you just talk me through the role you played and who it was that you were mentoring and the topics you were helping them around.
[00:03:47] Ong Tze Ch'in: Well, you see this is part of ADB's WOP 4R initiative.
[00:03:50] Piers Clark: Water Operators Partnership
[00:03:52] Ong Tze Ch'in: That's right. So we paired up with the Chennai Metro Water Supply and Sewerage Board in India and we work with them on two different things. One is water loss reduction which is a common problem that many utilities face and would like to work on. And second was energy reduction, particularly for desalination. We had good exchanges and hopefully they got something out of it and we'll see where that takes us.
[00:04:11] Piers Clark: We'll be talking to Chennai, I suspect as one of these podcasts.
[00:04:15] Ong Tze Ch'in: Oh dear, I hope they have good things to say about PUB.
[00:04:17] Piers Clark: I have no doubts they will, and I assume that it was Chennai who picked the topics that they wanted to learn from, and that was why you were chosen to be their mentor.
[00:04:25] Ong Tze Ch'in: Yes. So it's a bit of a matchmaking service that ADB plays here. So I think Chennai worked with ADB to come up with a problem statement and through the network they figure out, oh, PUB is the person you might want to talk to. Then the matchmaking happened and then we followed up.
[00:04:38] Piers Clark: And when you say ADB you mean the Asian Development Bank. Excellent. I've gotta ask, any mentor-mentee relationship, it's a two-way thing. Did you feel that you were only providing value to them? Or did you feel that there was value that came back to you as a mentor?
[00:04:51] Ong Tze Ch'in: I think any dialogue with any exchange, there's always a two-way conversation. You share what you have. But you also learn from the experience. You learn something new, you understand a different context, you understand a different situation. And I'm sure that my officers who went on the program came back from it with their own takeaways and experiences.
[00:05:08] Piers Clark: Wonderful. Well one of the other topics we're talking about a lot at this forum is obviously the burgeoning climate crisis and the challenges that the globe is facing.
[00:05:17] Piers Clark: And I'd like for us to take a few minutes to just talk specifically about the challenges that you are facing in Singapore around how the climate crisis and the flooding and coastal erosion and all of those things. And of course, more importantly, what actions PUB is taking to mitigate those.
[00:05:33] Ong Tze Ch'in: Well, from our point of view at PUB, we do see two big challenges. At the same time as climate change, the impacts that we see, we are also seeing continued growth for water supply, continued growth in demand, continued growth in the demand for water treatment capacity as well. So even as we combat climate change, we also have to prepare for a future where there's more demand for water.
[00:05:52] Ong Tze Ch'in: More demand for capacity to treat used wastewater. And so we have to deal with all of these at the same time. And to complicate things to add to it PUB has a mission that straddles through, I think a breadth that's a bit more than the typical utility. We deal with water supply, we have to treat wastewater, used water in our context.
[00:06:09] Ong Tze Ch'in: We have to deal with drainage and flood resilience, and we have to combat sea level rise. So coastal flooding,
[00:06:14] Piers Clark: it's basically anything to do with any part of the hydrological scheme. It sits under PUB for you, isn't it?
[00:06:20] Ong Tze Ch'in: Yes. Well that's what we are called in Singapore. We are PUB, the National Water Agency - if it's a water problem, we are it. We do have to balance all of these missions and work together with our stakeholders to try to deliver on these. And that is, I think one of the greatest challenges that we see be cause climate change poses challenges for water supply because of potentially dryer spells, which impacts then our typically weather dependent water sources, whether rain water, imported water from Malaysia. These are all sources of water that are climate dependent, weather dependent. NEWater installation are a bit more resilient against climate change but these are things that we have to think about.
[00:06:53] Ong Tze Ch'in: How do we manage that portfolio of our four national taps: one local catch water, which I spoke about catching every raindrop, imported water from Malaysia, which still supplies more than half of my water, NEWater, which is recycled wastewater and desalination that's our four national taps. NEWater and desalination are a bit more climate resilient and that sort of helps me hedge my portfolio of water sources when I have to deal with dry spells.
[00:07:16] Ong Tze Ch'in: But the flip side of it, it also comes with more extreme rain events. And flood is a problem for us. It's a mid mission area that we deal with. And in PUB we have to deal with both elements where there's coastal flooding 'cause of high tide, storm surges, as well as inland floods arising from intense rain.
[00:07:30] Ong Tze Ch'in: And I think when I go to the Global Water Summit, utilities talk about how all these impact their plants and so forth. For PUB, we have to deal with the national impact of such events. And for us, there is a multifaceted solution space that we have to deal with. So we have drainage infrastructure that we invest in. We have flood response teams that go down to support people who have faced troubles with floods. That's also a public effort that we have to do, just like how we go out to tell people, to conserve water, to save water as part of water demand management. We are also going out now to tell the public about how you can be resilient against floods, how we can build community resilience .
[00:08:05] Piers Clark: Cause everybody's gotta be bought into this. It can't just be left to PUB, the public's gotta own it as well.
[00:08:11] Ong Tze Ch'in: Well, you know how it is, right? How big of a drain do you build? Is that worth the money? At some point, you're gonna see an extreme rainfall event that will affect people and the drainage infrastructure just cannot take it.
[00:08:22] Piers Clark: You've been in post for 18 months, so you're through the honeymoon period. Your problems. You need to own them. What things are keeping you awake at night? What are you worried about?
[00:08:31] Ong Tze Ch'in: Well, there's a lot that I do worry about. I spoke about floods. Floods in Singapore are not a major event. They are flash floods. They happen, within an hour they typically recede, but public expectations are high in Singapore. And the question is always posed, can we do better? Can we reduce the scale of this? Can we have fewer areas that are impacted by flood? And then of course, is it worth spending all that money on infrastructure? All these questions are things that we worry about, both the short term as well as the long term.
[00:08:58] Piers Clark: I'm sure the good citizens of Singapore will be pleased that you are worrying about that. Now, we always finish with a slightly cheeky question and normally it's the question of what advice would you give your younger self?
[00:09:08] Piers Clark: But because this is your second podcast, you don't get that question. You get a much more cheekier question. So my question for you. Mr. Ong Tze Ch'in, chief executive of PUB is, when did you last cry?
[00:09:22] Ong Tze Ch'in: Okay, this is gonna sound almost expected. You know, most people cry in movies. It tends to be a tragedy, a sad movie. I cry at sad moments in macho movies. So the last sort of macho-ish movie that I watched was Top Gun Maverick. And you know that scene where, Maverick's plane get shot off the sky and you think he's died.
[00:09:39] Piers Clark: They hold you in suspense, don't they? You think he's gone?
[00:09:42] Ong Tze Ch'in: I teared at that moment.
[00:09:45] Piers Clark: Now that's because those 25 years in the military, you understood exactly what that meant, didn't you?
[00:09:51] Ong Tze Ch'in: Absolutely.
[00:09:52] Piers Clark: You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me, Piers Clark, and my guest today has been Mr. Ong Tze Ch'in, the Chief Executive of PUB in Singapore, and we've been talking about the Asian Development Bank Mentoring program, and about some of the challenges that PUB is facing over the coming decades. I hope you can join us next time. Thank you very much.