The Hindu : Packaged water is 'safe'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Feb 14, 2003

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National

Packaged water is 'safe'

By Gargi Parsai

New Delhi Feb.13. The Bureau of Indian Standards today said the packaged water being sold under its earlier specification in the Indian market was "safe" and conformed to the guidelines laid by the World Health Organisation. Yet, it also said the norms had been revised — taking into account the WHO guidelines and European standards — and would be notified after the Ministry of Health brought amendment to the Prevention of Food Adulteration (PFA) Act.

Quick to react, the Centre of Science and Environment (CSE), which exposed the high presence of pesticides in most bottled water, said the BIS was backing out of setting fresh norms under pressure from the industry. The CSE said that the WHO guidelines covered only five of the 20 pesticides tested by them under the European norms. The WHO was silent on "deadly" pesticides like chlorpyrifos, endosulphan, phospamidon and malathion. In fact, the WHO had no guidelines for organophosphate pesticides, the CSE has alleged.

Concerned at the controversy, the Minister for Food and Consumer Affairs, Sharad Yadav, has convened a high-level meeting on Friday with senior officials from the BIS, the Department of Consumer Affairs and the Department of Health.

On their part, after a hurriedly organised seminar on "Pesticide residues in packaged drinking water and packaged mineral water'', which lasted 90 minutes, the BIS and the Secretary, Consumer Affairs, Wajahat Habibullah, declared the bottled water as "absolutely safe". Of the 73 participants at the seminar, 23 were from the industry representing Pepsi, Coca Cola, Bisleri and other bottled water manufacturers. Neither Mr. Habibullah, nor the BIS Director-General, Nirmal Singh, could spell out how long the new standards would take to come into force.

In fact, the Indian Council for Agriculture Research representative, O.B. Dubey, went on to declare that pesticides "were not poisonous". He said the success of Indian agriculture had been on account of the chemical pesticides and fertilisers used in farming `or we would not have started exporting food". He said the seminar had recommended that it was better to adopt the WHO norm, as going along with the EU standards would hike the cost of bottled water. He, however, added that the CSE findings must be taken as a "wake-up call" and a scientific analysis must be undertaken for this.

What made the whole thing confusing was that on one hand, the Government officials declared that the WHO-based standards adopted by them were "safe" and on the other, they said the standards had been revised and needed to be notified. There was no answer as to what was the need to revise the specifications if the water was "safe". There were also no answers to whether the packaged water companies would be required to take their stuff off the shelf and by when they would have to come up with new ISI certification.

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