Speaking out against bottled water in Pakistan

More than half of bottled water brands unfit for use

Thursday, April 29, 2010
By Shahid Husain

Karach

As many as 12 out of the 22 brands of bottled water sold in Pakistan were “unsafe for human consumption,” Naeem Sadiq, an activist of Shehri-Citizens for a Better Environment (Shehri-CBE) said on Wednesday, while citing a 2004 report of the science and technology ministry’s Pakistan Council for Research in Water Resources (PCRWR).

During a lecture at the office of the Urban Resource Centre (URC), Sadiq said that these brands were found to be unsafe by none other than the government of Pakistan due to poor microbiological and chemical quality. Small wonder then, that on December 31, 2004, the Supreme Court of Pakistan was compelled to take a serious view of the report, he said, adding however, that sadly, one finds various unsafe brands of bottled water being marketed with impunity in the impoverished country.

On November 30, 2004, the Sindh High Court (SHC) also made history when it restrained an international water company from providing water in “Education City” at the Super Highway, Karachi, for American soldiers fighting the “war on terror” in Afghanistan, he said.

Had the SHC not done this, the Gadap aquifer would have been drained, affecting the lives and livelihood of the local population.

Sadiq said that as many as 200 billion bottles of water were produced across the world every year for a whopping $50billion business. One liter of bottled water in Pakistan costs 30 times more than the same amount of tap water, he added.

Bottled water means environmental degradation of the worst and involved the wastage of precious resources, Sadiq said. Around 200 billion plastic bottles are produced across the world every year and only 20 per cent of them are re-cycled, which is perhaps why the developed world, which is short of landfills, has found the developing world to be an ideal dumping ground of plastic waste, he said.

“Bottled water is one of the biggest scams of our time,” he said. Common folk and the elite alike are given the impression that bottled water was “pure” “safe” and “fresh” and has pristine labels — this, however, is a farce, Sadiq claimed.

Bottled water was first introduced in Pakistan in 1968, and amazingly, while the worldwide growth of bottled water was 24 per cent per annum; it was 40 per cent per annum in Pakistan, he said, adding that common folk were finding it increasingly difficult to get water in Pakistan.

Four factors push the demand for bottled water: exaggerated fear of tap water; seduction of mineral water bottles; corruption of the government; and the greed of the corporate sector, Sadiq said. The Karachi Water & Sewerage Board (KWSB) has a foreign debt of Rs 42 billion and no donor is ready to help anymore, he said.

“The plain truth is that there is no water shortage in Karachi because it receives 695 million gallons every day,” Sadiq said, adding however, that a major chunk of this is lost due to theft, pilferage and faulty lines.