Officials in Madagascar’s capital Antananarivo are to start charging for water from public taps in a conservation drive residents say will hit the poor and homeless hardest. The city’s 1.5 million residents aim the charges, which take effect from Dec. 1, at stemming wastage, said Antananarivo’s Director of Social Affairs, Antsa Ranjatoson. “There is too much water wasted,” he told Reuters. “People don’t try to save. Once the charges are in place, people will learn that you have take care with the water you consume.”

But city residents said the new fees could not come at a worse time. The cost of living on the giant Indian Ocean island has rocketed this year, with rampant inflation pushing up prices for basic commodities and sparking mass street protests. Most people in Antananarivo have no running water in their homes, and public taps provide crucial access to drinking water, especially for the street children and beggars who make up the ranks of the city’s most vulnerable.

“I’m really angry,” said one resident, Lala Rabemanatsoa. “I have been living here for 60 years and never paid for water. All of a sudden, we pay. The government live in their big houses with taps and they don’t care about people like us.”

Three-quarters of the 17 million people on the island off the coast of east Africa live on less than a dollar a day. Ranjatoson said city officials were only complying with a 1998 law that said water pumps in all Madagascar’s urban areas should start charging for water. Antananarivo was the last city to implement the law, he said.

The charges – 50 Malagasy Francs (about 0.5 U.S. cents) per 10 litre jerry can – were the first tariff since water pumps were installed during the French colonial era. Ranjatoson said they might be lowered or scrapped altogether in some areas if officials decided they were hurting the city’s poorest.

Residents urged the council to reverse the decision.“Fifty francs for one jerry can is too expensive for us,” said city dweller Jean Pierre Randrianato. “Just like everything else is getting too expensive. This is now the Malagasy curse.”