Packaged Drinking Water Is your bottle of water safe?
India is sitting on an acute drinkable water crisis. Wikipedia says we have only 4 per cent of the world’s fresh water resources despite a population of over 1.3 billion people. Additionally, safe potable water is not available everywhere in the country. Either harmful chemical substances are found in the layers of the earth which enter into water or it may be contaminated due to pathogenic micro-organisms. Consuming such water may cause water-borne diseases. Hence, it becomes imperative to process bottle safe potable water in prevailing conditions. In the following report, we tested 7 packaged water bottle brands to bring the best one for consumers. A report!
Water
with a very low amount of TDS gives it an insipid taste. BIS standard IS:14543 says quality drinking water should contain 500 mg/ per liter TDS maximum. Now, if we go back and brush up our knowledge about packaged drinking water, we may fall short of our knowledge about it. Packaged drinking water (other than packaged natural mineral water) is water derived from surface water or underground water or seawater which is subjected to herein under specified treatments. (Like-decantation, filtration, a combination of filtration, aeration filtration with membrane filter depth filter, cartridge filter, activated carbon filtration, demineralization, remineralization and reverse osmosis). This treated water is packed after disinfecting it to a level that should not lead to any harmful contamination in the drinking water through chemical agents or physical/UV methods. After processing to a level where it is consumable, the packaged drinking water needs to be filled in sealed containers of various compositions, forms, and capacities matching the suitability for direct consumption without further treatment. In case demineralization is a part of the treatment process, the ingredients used need to be of food-grade quality and conform to the requirements of Food Safety and Standard Authority of India (FSSAI) and rules framed there under.
How We Test
To make it easy for everyone, the Consumer Voice team had undertaken the comparative testing of 7 popular brands of packaged drinking water. The comparative test programme was based on the mandatory Indian standard IS
14543:2016. The test parameters for this study were mainly based on Indian Standard to judge the overall quality of packaged drinking water and also by following the FSS Regulations/ requirements. The test was conducted in a NABL accredited lab and analysis of packaged drinking water was done as per the above reference standard.