Treated water reached 85.6 per cent of Sarawak in August 2025, made up of more than 99 per cent coverage in urban areas and 71 per cent in rural ones, Utility and Telecommunication Minister Dato Sri Julaihi Narawi said at the launch of Sarawak Water Sdn Bhd. The distance between those two numbers is, in practice, the whole of the state's water problem. Closing it by 2030, he said, will take more than RM20 billion.

Who delivers the water changed in the same month. Three of the four bodies that had supplied Sarawak were folded into one company, leaving a single operator for the urban systems and a single government department for everything beyond them.

Who supplies the water, and where

The Rural Water Supply Department, Jabatan Bekalan Air Luar Bandar or JBALB, still sets out the older division of labour on its frequently asked questions page:

  • Kuching Water Board — Kuching city and Kota Samarahan, including some Kuching outskirts.
  • Sibu Water Board — most of Sibu town and its outskirts.
  • LAKU Management Sdn Bhd — Bintulu and Samalaju, Miri city and Limbang district.
  • JBALB — mostly rural areas, apart from the rural areas the other three already reach.

The first three no longer exist as separate operators. The merger into Sarawak Water Sdn Bhd took effect on 1 August 2025, with Kuching Water Board and Sibu Water Board dissolved, and the company was launched on 26 August 2025. Of 1,248 staff involved, 1,214 — 97.12 per cent — agreed to move across, while 34 remained in the state civil service.

JBALB keeps rural treated water, and it draws a firm line around what it does not do. The department does not operate or maintain alternative supplies: it points residents to the divisional health office for gravity feed water and to the Department of Minerals and Geoscience for groundwater, although it may still build such schemes.

What a rural scheme is actually made of

The Labang–Tubau road project near Bakun shows the anatomy of a single rural supply, and its cost. The ministry put the value at about RM130.6 million in October 2024. One package lays 98km of pipes in various sizes. The other builds a water treatment plant of 10 million litres a day, two high-level tanks holding 3.5 million litres each, a three-million-litre reservoir, surface water intake structures and the associated mechanical and electrical works.

What that buys is clean water for 62 houses and villages and 3,310 residents, with completion set for the second quarter of 2026. On those figures the scheme works out at roughly RM39,000 for every person it serves. An urban connection carries nothing like that cost, and the arithmetic is the reason rural coverage moves in single percentage points.

The plants, and which ones carry the load

Sarawak operates more than 100 water treatment plants, and the plan is to have fewer of them. Smaller plants are to be decommissioned and repurposed as booster stations, while the large ones are upgraded; 20 more plants are in planning, either new builds or expansions, under the Sarawak Master Plan.

The Batu Kitang plant serving Kuching is the worked example. Its capacity rose from 764 to 868 million litres a day, lifting the reserve margin from 5 per cent to 12 per cent, with a further increase to 968 million litres a day planned within two years of October 2024.

Capacity is not evenly spread. In February 2026 the ministry said Samarahan division has no plant able to meet its demand except at Sebuyau, which produces only 3.5 million litres a day, and that Batu Kitang's service area had been extended to cover the division. JBALB has been instructed to study a new Sebuyau plant of at least 20 million litres a day as a backup to Batu Kitang, and a plant at Tebedu to back up the Slabi plant in Serian, which currently produces 110 million litres a day.

Where Sibu fits on the grid

The state is knitting these plants into a water supply grid, and the Salim plant is one of its anchors. In January 2022 the ministry said Salim would be one of the anchor plants supplying the central region, and that a Phase 3 upgrade would take it from 150 million litres a day to 300 million litres a day to meet demand until 2040.

The same statement described how treated water then travels. Under the Kanowit Phase 2 works, a new 1,000mm pipeline runs from the Salim plant to existing 600mm and 450mm lines towards Sibu Jaya, with a booster station and a 3.5-million-litre elevated tank. Trunk main, booster, tank, then progressively smaller pipes: that sequence is what a household on the edge of a town is waiting for. Our coverage of the Sibu division follows the district it serves.

How fast the rural share is moving

The trend is real but slow. Rural coverage was 67.2 per cent in 2022, 70.5 per cent as at 2024 and 71 per cent by August 2025 — about four percentage points in three years, with 29 to find before 2030.

For settlements the pipes will not reach in time, the state runs Sarawak Alternative Water Supply, or SAWAS, which JBALB describes plainly as a stop gap for isolated settlements that have yet to have safe and clean water. Its systems are designed to be run and maintained by the community itself and, where possible, to use gravity rather than pumps and chemicals.

The pipes already in the ground

Some of the shortfall is loss rather than absence. Non-revenue water stood at 43 per cent in February 2024 — water treated and pumped but never billed — which the minister attributed largely to 2,742km of old and dilapidated pipes still in the distribution system. RM1.085 billion was approved through alternative funding to replace them in phases from that year. By August 2025 the figure quoted was RM1.1 billion covering 2,740km, a close but not identical restatement.

JBALB runs its own replacement programme of 420 projects worth RM558 million. As of March 2025, 307 had yet to start, 84 were in planning and 29 were under way, against an approved budget of RM119 million for 2024 and 2025.

What the 2030 target requires

Against the RM20 billion estimate, the state had approved nearly RM6 billion for water supply development since 2018. A further RM4 billion went to Projek Rakyat, which the ministry called nearly complete in October 2024, with more work running under the 12th Malaysia Plan.

Mukah division shows the scale one division absorbs: 45 projects costing RM1.84 billion, of which 26 were completed and commissioned, four were ongoing and 15 were in planning, for divisional coverage of 83.6 per cent in February 2024.

Readers comparing statements should note the numbers are snapshots, not a series. Statewide coverage was given as 85.4 per cent in both February and October 2024 and as 85.6 per cent in August 2025, and the length of ageing pipe as 2,742km and then 2,740km. The direction is consistent; the precision is not.

Sources