Bottled Water: How Safe?
The bottled water industry has spent billions over the past decade to sell you on the idea that bottled water is better than tap water. Well the short answer is they are both unhealthy. One of the most ironic parts of the bottled water tragedy is that the water bottling industry gets the water free, filters it, bottles it and sells it back to us at 1,900% profit. The ironic part is that tap water is legislated to be 7.0 pH neutral. They first dump a TON of cholrine in the water to kill off all the bad bacteria, this makes it highly acidic.In India around 100 companies sell an estimated 424 million litres of bottled water valued at around Rs 200 crore in the country annually . Most bottlers claim that their water is 100 per cent bacteria-free and contains minerals that make it tastier and healthier. But is the water in these bottles really safe to drink? Do they conform to international or national standards?
To find out, the Ahmedabad-based Consumer Education and Research Society (CERS), an independent non-profit institution with a sophisticated product-testing laboratory, recently carried out a detailed study on 13 major brands of bottled water available in the country. The national brands -- Bisleri (separate samples were taken from their units in Bangalore, Ghaziabad, Calcutta and Baroda) and Bailley (Mumbai and Surat) -- were selected on the basis of their dominant position in the overall market. Bisil (Mehsana), Golden Eagle (Chennai), Aquaspa (Mumbai),Saiganga (Ahmednagar), Nirantar (Thane), Trupthi (Chennai) and Yes (Nadiad) were included because of their regional popularity. To conform to international standards for such testing, 21 bottles of each brand were tested in the CERS laboratory against "analytical" and "sensory" parameters as well as for "microbiological" contamination. To ensure fairness, the results were sent to the individual companies for their comments.
So how safe is bottled water? Not that safe, says the CERS survey. As many as 10 of the 13 brands had foreign floating objects in clear violation of norms. Again during a surprise inspection by the health committee chairman Manjunatha Reddy and team at two mineral water units in the Bangalore on January 11, 2011, it was
found that mineral water production unit owners were bottling borewell water. The units were also illegally using several branded labels on the bottles to market the water. The standing committee visited a mineral water production unit called AM Enterprises and found the owner selling water without an ISI mark from the Bureau of India Standards. He was found mixing mineral water with borewell water and selling it in cans to the public.
Water resources over-exploited
The majority of the bottling plants are dependent on groundwater. They create huge water stress in the areas where they operate because groundwater is also the main source - in most places the only source - of drinking water in India.This has created huge conflict between the community and the bottling plants.
Private companies in India can siphon out, exhaust and export groundwater free because the groundwater law in the country is archaic and not in tune with the realities of modern capitalist societies. The existing law says that "the person who owns the land owns the
groundwater beneath". This means that, theoretically, a person can buy one square metre of land and take all the groundwater of the surrounding areas and the law of land cannot object to it. This law is the core of the conflict between the community and the companies and the major reason for making the business of bottled water in the country highly lucrative.
Take for instance the case of Coca-Cola's bottling plant in drought-prone Kala Dera near Jaipur. Coca-Cola gets its water free except for a tiny cess (for discharging the wastewater) it pays to the State Pollution Control Board - a little over Rs.5,000 a year during 2000-02 and Rs.24,246 in 2003. It extracts half a million litres of water every day - at a cost of 14 paise per 1,000 litres. So, a Rs.10 per litre Kinley water has a raw material cost of just 0.02-0.03 paise. (It takes about two to three litres of groundwater to make one litre of bottled water.)
On April 7, more than 1,500 villagers defied a police cordon and marched to Coca-Cola's bottling plant in Mehdiganj village, Varanasi, in Uttar Pradesh state, demanding that the company immediately shut down its bottling plant. In January, the New Delhi-based Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) advised Coca-Cola to shut a bottling plant in the drought-stricken state of Rajasthan.
India's Ministry of Water Resources has ranked 80% of ground water resources in Rajasthan as "over- exploited" and nearly 34% resources as "dark/ critical", the gravest ranking across the country
