The Hindu : Enforce better standards

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Feb 12, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - Editorials

Enforce better standards

PURE WATER, AS claimed, is not pure enough. Many branded water bottles contain pesticide residues that exceed permissible levels, as a non-governmental agency's study showed last week. The Union Department of Science and Technology's experts have also confirmed it. Serious official efforts are now on to improve the existing standards and norms for "packaged drinking water". All this is putting pressure on the Rs.1,000-crore packaged or bottled water business. The Delhi-based NGO, Centre for Science and Environment, revealed that a random analysis of the bottled water of 30 brands in Delhi and Mumbai showed that many of the samples contained pesticide residues such as organochlorines and organophosphorous, including Lindane, DDT and Malathion. Within days of the study reports being made public, a flood of advertisements was released by the branded water manufacturers explaining the technologies they use to make their water as pure as can be.

But, the study report gained credence when the Union Minister for Science and Technology, Murli Manohar Joshi, personally wrote to the Prime Minister, A.B. Vajpayee, stating that the department scientists "found considerable merit in the findings and conclusions" of the NGO study. In a flurry of welcome initiatives, the Union Ministry of Food and Civil Supplies has decided to update the provisions of the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act to raise the standards for packaged/bottled drinking water and the Bureau of Indian Standards wants to adopt European standards to limit individual pesticide residues in drinking water to less than one part in a billion and total pesticide residues to less than five parts in a billion. At present, BIS standards merely say pesticide residues should be "non-detectable".

Millions of consumers countrywide buy bottled and packaged water not merely for taste or convenience, but for the potential health benefits the pure water is supposed to provide. Studies by the World Health Organisation show that drinking water can be contaminated by a range of chemical (lead, arsenic, benzene) and microbial hazards (bacteria or virus such as Hepatitis A and Vibrio Cholerae) or even physical hazards (metal and glass fragments). Again to quote the WHO, because of these large numbers of hazards, the development of standards for drinking water requires significant resources and expertise which many countries may not be able to afford. To guide the countries to set up uniform and strict standards, the WHO has now released a draft of its Edition 3 on drinking water quality. Most of the branded water makers say they comply to the existing Edition 2 of WHO standards as also the BIS standards.

The reasons for pesticide residues found in the drinking water are not far to seek. The source for most of the bottled or packaged water is surface water or municipal piped supply. Sometimes they depend on local river systems or water sources. In many developing nations such as India, all these sources are known to be polluted beyond reasonable levels by the indiscriminate dumping of municipal and industrial wastes. The impact of these is there for the world to see. Nearly 3.4 million persons die worldwide annually of water-related diseases. What is now required is a serious effort at the national level to evolve and strictly enforce accurate quantitative standards, as also regular/random sampling and testing systems. The enforcement machinery should come within the purview of a unified head, instead of remaining distributed among the Food, the Health and the Science and Technology departments. The labelling on the bottles also needs standardisation. However, the onus continues to be more on with the social responsibility shown by the corporate citizens. The least the manufacturers can do is to ensure the best of health for their consumers by complying with global norms on water purity.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Opinion

Stories in this Section

A shortsighted approach

Enforce better standards

Sovereignty and the Naga issue

Crime & punishment in cyberspace

Rethinking India's Gulf strategy

Politics of defection

Honouring Kalpana

Pesticides in water