I am a reporter; I have lived in Jordan for 8 years. First off: the rationing is not so bad: people in most areas of Amman, who do not run car washes (!) and do not use the garden hose to wash the sidewalk in front of their house (I see it every day) do not run out of water regularly, though there are some areas of the city that get water less frequently than others.

In general, Jordan’s problem is not lack of water, but misuse of it. 70 percent of the country’s water goes to an agricultural sector that produces less than 3 percent of GDP, according to official statistics. In part, this is because water is subsidized, and costs virtually nothing. They grow a superabundance of tomatoes that sell for less than the real cost of the water in them.

Municipalities waste water too. Why fix leaks when there’s no cost? Why not hose down your car every day, when the water is free? I see it all the time.
Recently, someone stole or broke the lids on the water tanks on my buildings roof. The tanks became breeding grounds for mosquitos, which needed to be cleaned and fixed. We hired a company to do this. You would think, in such a water-poor country, they would have some way of re-using the water, right? Empty it into a tanker and sell it on to someone who would use it for garden irrigation, or something. How many times must they do this every day?
No: they just poured 3.5 cubic meters of water into the street. This is what happens when the price of a good is artificially lowered far below it’s actual cost. Jordan’s water-poverty represents misuse of available resources much more than actual resource scarcity.