More on Bottled Water! - Sunita Narain

In my Independence Day post, I had mentioned 'Freedom from Bottled Water' as one aspiration statement for an Independent Nation. Here is Sunita Narain, Editor of Down To Earth on the same subject in the recent issue.

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Editorial: Bottled water costs us the earth

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By Sunita Narain

The bottled water industry is global in nature. But it is designed to
sell the same product to two completely different markets: one water
rich and the other water scarce. The question is whether this industry
will have different outcomes in these two worlds. Or will we, for two
opposite reasons, agree that their business costs us the earth and that
it is not good for us?

In the water and economically-rich world, bottled water started as a
luxury-a non-essential item of desire, health and status. The water came
from fancy mountain streams: they were packaged and sold as
mineral-filled sparkling water. It was different from tap water and a
healthy (and snobbish) alternative to sweet and street smart colas. But
soon, the industry grew. In most cases, the companies sold water that
was not sourced from mountain springs but from public water: municipal
water sources. Once the snob habit was formed and the market created,
the companies simply packaged tap water in most cases into plastic
bottles and sold it from supermarkets.

Like nobody said the emperor had no clothes on. Nobody asked why they
were buying water for ten times the municipality's price. Call it a
great advertising success, but this non-essential industry is growing
exponentially. In 2006, Americans paid over US $11 billion to buy 31
billion litres of bottled water, and they are thirsting for more.

But the bubble is bursting. Last month, San Francisco's mayor banned the
use of bottled water in government buildings, incriminating billions of
disposed plastic bottles that filled landfills. In the us, a staggering
60 million plastic bottles are thrown away each day, a miniscule
proportion of them are recycled. Greenhouse gas emission from trucks
which transported the bottles across the state-and often across
countries-was also a reason for the ban.

But equally importantly, the mayor stressed that his city's municipal
water came from pristine sources inside a national park. This was as
good, if not better, than the bottled water sold by companies, he said.

He is not alone. Last year, Salt Lake City's mayor asked public
employees to stop supplying bottled water at official events. New York
has launched a US $1 million campaign to encourage people to drink its
famously clean public water. Another slap has come from top-notch
restaurants, which-in reverse snobbery-are refusing to serve bottled
water. The worst is coming. Last week, junk food giant Pepsi was forced
to admit in the us that Aquafina, its bottled water, is nothing more
than tap water. It has agreed to label its bottles to say what it
doesn't want to: that Aquafina is tap water from a public water source.

The bottled water industry is in damage control mode. But I believe that
this scream could easily become a shout as people realise the
environmental cost of this product and realise the sheer stupidity of
paying dearly for something that is cheaper and readily available.

Bottled water is also growing big time in our world. India is said to be
the 10th largest bottled water consumer in the world. The demand has
increased from two million cases in 1990 to an estimated 68 million
cases by 2006. But in India, bottled water is growing as an item of
necessity: private industry is meeting the drinking water demand that
public utilities don't meet. People are paying prices that they cannot
afford because they have no alternative.

In India, this water does not come from municipal taps but from
groundwater. Companies simply drill a hole in the ground, pump and clean
(some-times) to bottle it and then transport it to cities. Simply put,
this is the privatisation of drinking water.

The business is a rip-off. 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 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. In other
words, raw material costs of the Rs 12 per litre Kinley water sold to
you and me is just 0.02-0.03 paise.

Add to it treatment costs. Even with the state-of-the-art treatment
system with reverse osmosis and membranes, the cost of treatment is Rs
0.25 per litre at the most. Plastic bottle is what costs the
company-between Rs 3-4 for a one-litre container. Transportation-from
the bottling plant to our cities and homes-adds significantly to the
costs as does all the sales and advertising pitch. But add up all costs
and it is still a dream business, especially in a country with failing
public water supply.

The fact is that bottled water is no different from water that should
come from our taps. The only difference is it is packed in plastic and
not conveyed in pipelines. But, while the Indian rich can afford to buy
bottled water, the poor cannot. The rich have the choice and they opt
out of the failing municipal systems. What is forgotten is that Indian
water systems are failing because the rich in the country-who can afford
bottled water-are still supplied water at a tenth of what it costs the
municipality. Worse, our wastewater is conveyed and pumped from our
homes and even treated (at times). None of this cost is recovered. In
other words, it is our subsidy which is leading to poorer and poorer
delivery from water agencies. It is the rich, who have options to drink
bottled, who are failing the system.

I am not even talking here of the mountains of plastic waste, the
disposal of which isn't paid for. I am talking here of the imperative
that we should fix water for all in all taps. Water in bottles costs the
earth everywhere.

Read editorial online >>
www.downtoearth.org.in/cover_nl.asp?mode=2

To comment, write to >>
editor@downtoearth.org.in

News Comment: PM to inaugurate 2nd 'International Rice Congress' tomorrow!!!

Conference title, "International Rice Congress"?

Rice? Connie Rice? No, 'Rice' as in the staple diet of 60+% of Indians, Rice as in the largest produced crop in India, Rice which is the livelihood of maybe more than half of the Indian farmers. So, an international conference on rice should have the producers, you think, tough luck. With its priorities on developing agriculture in this country to achieve 8% growth, the government decides that rice is what the corporates decide it to be...so, we have (read the following news item in full)

The conference is being organised by Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) and the International Rice Research Institute, Manila (Philippines).
The theme of the five-day conference this year is 'Science, Technology, and Trade for Peace and Prosperity'. The conference envisages providing a forum for sharing the interests of stakeholders like cultivators, researchers, and traders of rice with special focus on water conservation and use of hybrid seeds for increase in production.
Much attention will be paid on use of hybrid seeds over large area for improving production with minimum use of water, said Dr. Mangla Rai, Secretary, Department of Agricultural Research and Education (DARE) and Director General, ICAR.
The major events scheduled during the event are International Rice Research Conference, International Rice Commerce Conference, International Rice Technology and Cultural Exhibition and International Ministerial round table meeting.
A number of committees had been constituted to facilitate the holding of the Congress like the Steering, Advisory, and Organizing committees. Minister of Agriculture, Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution Sharad Pawar will be the patron of the Steering Committee.
Ministerial representation for the Congress has been confirmed from countries like China, Nepal, Indonesia, Vietnam, Pakistan, Laos, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Besides, 1,400 scientists, rice traders, rice millers and selected farmers are expected to attend the Congress. About 400 foreign delegates, representing 40 countries, will deliberate on various issues on rice research over different sessions and workshops.

What has a conference on rice got to do with Peace and Prosperity? That which consists of scientists and traders, one would think will largely deal with how to increase scientific project budgets and how to improve profit margins. Are these people going to be talking about Peace and Prosperity for their professions? One can understand why when there are 1400 people attending the programme with 400 foreign delegates in a country of more than half a billion farmers only 'selected farmers' are expected to attend. Such pompous title and grandiose that means so little to the Indian rice farmer!!! No wonder more farmers are committing suicides in this country.

Sad Reminder!...on 9/11

Got this in my morning mail today forwarded by a friend...a sad reminder...

"... of course the people don't want war ... But after all it is the leaders of
the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag
the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a
parliament, or a communist dictatorship ... Voice or no voice, the people can
always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you
have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists
for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger..."

- Herman Goering, Nazi leader - April 18, 1946 - W.W.II Nuremberg Trials

Those who fail to learn the lessons that history teaches, are doomed to repeat them."

September 11 (or should we say, 9/11) and what it entails…

Five years after Sept. 11, bin-Laden is still at large, a recent video supposedly of him plotting the twin-tower bombing is a reminder well timed that he continues to cast his shadow on the international policies, commerce and security.

A US govt. report released yesterday absolves Saddam Hussein of all connections with bin-Laden thereby knocking off one more of the primary reasons for invading Iraq by the USA, with many earlier reports already saying that there were no WMD in Iraq, the Bush administration stands with its head held high on a pedestal of lies, utter lies and nothing but lies w.r.to the Iraq war. They ought not to deny some of the lies as it would make them look like fools.

The five years have produced an annual ritual of ground zero articles, more on ‘clash of civilizations’, a witch hunt on Islam and more concretization and polarization of the world into small groups of those who believe in their faith’s ability solve all world problems – whether the faith be Islam, Christianity, Democracy, Trade or Modern Science & Technology.

Sadly, these groups don’t lead a mutually exclusive existence. The globalized world is so highly inter-connected that the life in many urban centres of the world are inter-connected and cannot survive without other cities functioning in other parts of the world. A new global inter-dependency means, more engagement with each other. In a concretization of groups through their faith systems, the first premise is the absolute and non-negotiable correctness of oneself with a corollary that everyone else is wrong. Such fanatical holding to ones’ position should have resulted in a highly fragmented world. But that is not the case, the world is not in fragments and seems to get more inter-connected, which means either there is something wrong with what is uniting the world or there is something wrong with such groupism. Perhaps there is something wrong with both.

However, this has resulted in each group accepting the globalized world order and giving it ones own interpretation and colour to hide ones’ opportunistic and hypocratic holding on to the faith system. The Communist CM of W.Bengal giving hurried clean chit to the Cola giants and so many myopic discussion on Vande Mataram rendering are recent examples in our own political sphere, which is only a sample of what is happening across the globe.

There are no puritans of any faith system, there are no ‘orthodoxy’ but more of the meaningless ‘fanatical’, there is no ‘ideologues’ or ‘conservatives’ any longer whom one can look up to for what is it to conserve a tradition, a view, a political ideology or a religion. The days of disciplined adherence to an idea that is not compromised in the day to day turmoil, seems to have disappeared even the realm of science which in earlier centuries saw the fearless adherence and pursuit of truth. Commerce and concretization of resources has ensured that the scientific enquiry too is pre-validated through investor’s microscope. Yet there is no lack of fanatics who hold science and technology as a solution to every human problem far superior to any other such solution ever found by humanity, this group may become one of the largest group of fanatics in the coming days (if not already).

The prejudices that are imposed by the polarized media, restrict even interaction across certain group boundaries, repeatedly emphasizing its point of view and ensuring that the status quo demons remain demons.

September 11th, 1893 saw Swami Vivekananda give a lecture in the Chicago Congress of Religions in which he stated that the day of ‘bigotory’ is over and mutual respect and inter-dependency has to be respected. Thirteen years later, in 1906, Mahatma Gandhi convened a meeting in which the idea of a Peaceful Struggle ‘with God as the witness’ was proclaimed (read the article by Venu and Dilip in the HINDU on this), and perhaps the most amazing social tool of the previous century, called Satyagraha was born.

Both Gandhiji and earlier Swami Vivekananda prescribed by the Bhagavat Gita and some of the verses from this ancient Hindu book illustrates our current situation. Arjuna (who represents the normal human being in the conversation between the human and the God), asks Krishna, “knowingly why does a human being commit crime? What is it that impels him, despite his knowledge to commit a crime?”, the response holds a lesson to modern society,
…

Kama esa, Krodha esa rajoguna samudbhava
Mahasano Mahapapma viddyenamiha
vairinam (3.37)
‘It is sensual desire, it is anger, born out of
rajo-guna;
Great Craving and Great Crime; know this as the enemy here (in
human life)

Consumerist attitude, fuelled by Desire and Crime fuelled by Anger these can over shadow any knowledge and overwhelm the knowledge holder. Aren’t these our problems today, unrestrained consumerism that is often promoted as a ‘way of life’ that wants to consume as much resources as possible even at the cost of destroying others and an anger so complete and blind that it deprives a group of its human-ness. And both these groups accepting their position as non-negotiable. Sept 11 is a celebration of this impasse, a statement on the failure of knowledge before consumerism and anger. A reminder that the commercialization of knowledge is but a subservient of a un-restrained desire of a fanatical trading community; that terrorism is but an angry response to such greediness.