A watery business
It would have been difficult to imagine bottled water as a viable business sometime back. Today, when we buy water, and contribute our bit to the $50 billion business, what we buy is not just health, but the marketing that the companies tell us about their water- where it comes from, how healthy it is, what it says about us.
It is ironic that while at one end, 1 in 6 people worldwide do not have a reliable source of drinking water and 3,000 children a day die from diseases caught from tainted water, the US inspite of having one of the safest tap water in the world, contributes $15 billion to the business.
In 2002, we Indians consumed an estimated $250 million (Rs. 1000 crore) worth of bottled water with the industry estimated to grow at 40% - an industry where the contents of the bottle are usually suspect. Are we going to become a nation where the convenience of purchasing a bottle of water supersedes the requirement for building good monitoring systems for our tap water? Shouldn’t the right to clean drinking water be akin to a fundamental right - but then, so should clean air I guess.
Related reads:
Message in a Bottle
Bottled loot
Boond-boond mein paisa: Bottled water is big business
Watch before you drink that water!
Filed under: Business, Statistics