Bottled Water, Third World...

There was a time when Trivandrum had a very good water supply system. We had 24/7 water supply: clean, potable water, though a bit over-chlorinated at times. We never had any problems drinking the water straight from the tap. I remember our school taking us on a trip to the water purification plant to show us how it was all done. I still remember the crystal clear water flowing out at the end of the purification process.

Then, I went off to other parts of the country for studies and work, places where you got water from the tap for a couple of hours daily at best. In those places, sometimes you get nice brown water from the taps, especially just after the start of the rainy season. Water that looked like tea brewed from the first flush Darjeeling leaves, with a spot of milk depending on the time of the day. Now, there's a nice cuppa! And, I used to brag about Trivandrum to people there.

But, somewhere down the line things changed. During my brief visits home to Trivandrum I found that the water supply had become erratic. My mother had started collecting and boiling the water that came out of the tap. No more "straight-from-the-tap" drinking. Water mains and pipes started bursting regularly. The ones bursting were not the old pipes but the newly laid pipes (apparently linked to a kickback scandal). Now, that is progress. And as usual, we all got used to it.

There is a reason for these water supply reminiscences. Couple of months ago, Kitami (where I live now in Japan) had a problem with its municipal water supply. Muddy water got into the upstream plant after heavy rains and suddenly the taps were spewing out the good ol' cuppa. Nice brown water. And surprisingly it didn't get fixed for a few days. I never thought I'd see water being delivered by the fire service (in a non-disaster situation) in Japan, much less, me standing in line with cans to get water in Japan. But that's what happened. It went on for 4-5 days and even after the supply was restored the water was not exactly fully clean. And it broke down again after a couple of weeks.

The immediate beneficiary of this was the bottled water business. Everybody, including us, was buying up and hoarding bottled water by the crates. We stopped drinking the water from the tap, just like in Trivandrum. Was this a kind-hearted measure by Kitami to make me feel at home? In between, I made a brief trip to India and on coming back I still found my sis-in-law et al using bottled water. I didn't see any problem and promptly went back to drinking the tap water.

On coming back, another thing happened that made me wonder whether there really was a secret movement underway in Kitami to make me feel at home. There was a power outage, though only for a few minutes, just after I came back. Is Japan going third world?

P.S. The bottled water business is one of the biggest scams perpetrated on developed country people. Studies have shown that the publicly supplied water in places like Japan is of good quality and might even be better than the mineral water, at a fraction of the price. But people have started preferring bottled water to tap water. So, what did the water authorities do? They started selling their own water in bottles. Now, you can buy Tokyosui (bottled tap water sold by the Tokyo water supply authority) and various other bottled tap water brands from cities such as Yokohama and Sapporo. This is something which we used to see in India: guys collecting bottles from the streets where people throw it and refilling it with tap water before selling it.