Poison in your drink

BS OPINION

The most obvious question is whether CSE's startling allegations are correct. The companies concerned have questioned them but they have not chosen to make their own test records public "" as CSE has with regard to its tests.

There is a case for a presumption in CSE's favour at this stage, since its earlier findings on bottled water have gone unchallenged and the same companies are involved in the soft drinks business. But the matter should not be allowed to remain a dispute between CSE and the companies.

Indeed, since millions of people drink these products every day (and will continue to do so, as they have done with bottled water), the case should not be allowed to linger.

The government should quickly pick samples at random and have these tested at reliable labs, at home and abroad, and make the results public. The cynical corporate response that sales of soft drinks will pick up after a brief lull, should not be allowed to become the last word on the subject.

The second point concerns the whole business of quality definitions for food products, and the procedure for ensuring that the defined standards are met.

CSE has highlighted several glaring and indeed scandalous lacunae in this sphere. It is clear that the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) and other government bodies have been caught napping a second time by CSE.

There are either no norms in place, or they are so lenient as to raise questions about why the standards were set so loosely; and the matter seems to fall between the different ministries and therefore goes unsupervised.

The last time round, BIS scrambled to correct itself, but there is nothing to show that any of the bottled water companies have changed their manufacturing process to ensure water purity.

The problem of poor quality Indian laboratories is compounded by the lax monitoring of products in the market.

In the pharmaceutical industry, for instance, the spurious drugs industry is estimated to be a fifth the size of the genuine industry, in terms of value; in terms of the quantity of drugs (which is more relevant), it is around a third.

Yet, it is rarely that you find government inspectors or laboratories testing these and drugs exposing the malaise. And in cases where the drugs are found to be sub-standard, even the most basic punishment takes years.

Even in non-food sectors, like petroleum, the level of adulteration is scandalously high, so much so that an oil marketing company has formulated its unique marketing pitch around the promise of pure petrol. Ironically, while large-scale adulteration continues, large labs set up to test fuel lie almost completely unused.

On water, there is the larger problem of non-bottled water that comes into homes through the pipes. Where standards exist for this water, they are non-enforceable, which shows that government bodies and municipalities don't want to be held accountable for the water they provide citizens "" though the consequences for public health are both obvious and horrendous.