Saturday, August 19, 2006
Public Apathy and Perverse Priorities
Suppose for a moment that news items on two formerly ministerial Singhs, Sachin, tomato prices, Kareena, Coke and Pepsi and the ground-water that is ever so slowly, but surely poisoning over a billion Indians develop almost simultaneously. Which items would the media cover most prominently? Were they to grant equal prominence to all, which would you watch or read most avidly?
Therefrom arises my discontent. We, our politicians and our media suffer from a firecracker syndrome concerning news. We pay attention if it is sparkling or loud; we lose interest if it is a long, slow-burning fuse, even if it leads to a munitions warehouse.
Permit me some pedantry, regarding mg/litre and parts per billion. Take three one-litre bottles of distilled water and pour out fifteen drops of water from each. Now add fifteen drops of a liquid toxin, say cobra venom (which attacks humans much like some pesticides), to the first bottle. Shake it vigorously and add fifteen drops of that mixture to the second bottle and shake that vigorously. Finally, add fifteen drops from the second bottle to the third and shake again. The third bottle will now have 0.001 mg/litre or 1ppb of venom. A sip of that mixture will not hurt you. But, would you let your children drink two litres a day of it, for decades to come, knowing the effect to be cumulative?
Politicians First
When the news regarding pesticides in bottled water first broke, over three years ago, the political furor was deafening. Our politicians screamed bloody murder and wanted Coke and Pepsi banned – promptly did so, from their canteen. Then, they set up a Joint Parliamentary Committee, headed by Mr. Sharad Pawar.
This JPC, the first one ever convened to address a public health issue, issued a report just about a year after the Centre for Science and Environment, headed by India’s Rachel Carson, Ms Sunita Narain, first sounded the alarm. Below are some extracts from the JPC report (italics added):
“The Ministry of Health ……. suddenly became alive to the entire issue only after the CSE… published its report ….”
“…… Prevention of Food Adulteration Act, 1954 ….. but no quality standards except for the microbiological contaminant standards for the final soft drinks are specified.”
“It is only recently that the Ministry of Health … issued notification …. prescribing standards of 0.0001 mg/litre for individual pesticides and 0.0005 for total pesticides for packaged drinking water … w.e.f. 1.1.2004.”
“… 181 pesticides are registered ... Committee has noted with dismay that …. MRLs (maximum residue levels) for 71 pesticides only have been fixed …..”
“The Committee has expressed the view that norms for drinking water should be formulated …... It is at the same time very essential that these standards are made legally enforceable. Earnest efforts ….”
The last quote is all the report said about drinking water. We drink some two billion litres of water a day (including in tea, etc.). In comparison, we drink a total of under ten billion litres of bottles water and soft drinks in a year. In other words, we drink more than seventy times as much regular water as bottled water and soft drinks. The US Congress passed the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974. Other developed countries passed similar acts decades ago. Yet, our politicians are still “expressing views” on “earnest efforts” while screaming about American soft drinks. Why waste time formulating norms de novo when numerous countries and respected international bodies have already done so?
Ms Narain understands politicians – the only way she can draw political attention to laws on drinking water is to spotlight American companies. Smt. Sushma Swaraj, having done little as the Health Minister, now attacks the current government. Mr. Anbumani Ramadoss, a doctor and her successor, didn’t even show up to answer questions in parliament. Mr. Pawar is now the minister for agriculture. Farming families, over 60% of India’s population, drink water that is not even filtered. Has he gone beyond “expressing views”, to bat for rural families?
The problem is not just at the Centre. The current government of Tamil Nadu came to power partly by promising free colour television sets. Wouldn’t residential water purification systems have demonstrated greater concern for public welfare? What have the parties on the left done about safe drinking water? Or Mr. Vajpayee, one of our most respected leaders - he has written on parliamentary privilege. Isn’t safe drinking water a public privilege?
The Media
They have covered these issues extensively, even with articles and editorials on the need for safe drinking water. But, the emphasis has overwhelmingly been on Coca-Cola and Pepsi and the implicit tone has been “those Yanks are at it again”.
Editors of this newspaper don’t want to ban colas, since “palliatives don’t provide solutions” - they want to ban pesticides! Are they aware that mosquito-borne diseases are endemic to India, or that cotton-farmer suicides (due to crops devastated by pests) may jump a hundredfold from current levels? Last week, the US Environmental Protection Agency announced a programme that could lead to the elimination of 3,200 applications of certain pesticides, organophosphates and carbamates, and modifications in 1,200 others. It didn’t ban pesticides.
TV, with its format ill suited to serious deliberation, has faired worse. Some channels do an excellent job of raising public awareness on critical issues (e.g. toxins in ayurvedic medicines). However, when they try to do so through live-audience panel shows, they merely launch shouting matches among people who are often unqualified to speak on the subject under discussion. One such show on pesticide contamination amounted to little more than an attack by a PR executive and a pesticide manufacturer on Ms Narain, who was defended by a clueless politician.
There were no public health, medical or water purification professionals to enlighten viewers. The audience was deafened, not enlightened.
Toxin mathlab Coca Cola?
Coke and Pepsi have both said that their Indian soft drinks meet US standards. They have also attacked CSE for saying otherwise and cited government labs which essentially agreed with CSE. Interestingly, reports say that imported samples of Coke and Pepsi tested by CSE did meet US and EU standards. It is not clear whether we should castigate them as recalcitrant renegades or pity their incompetence.
If they are meeting US standards, it is even less clear why they aren’t paying for ads pushing for the immediate adoption of US norms? To be evenhanded, samples of Parle’s and McDowell’s products failed the CSE tests as well.
CSE has estimated the cost of treating bottled water at around 25 paise a litre, against the retail price of about ten rupees. Adsorption through granulated activated charcoal is the treatment specified by the US EPA for reducing pesticide contamination to tolerable levels. Multi-stage household water purifiers use this process. Boiling and micro-filtration will not do the job.
The Buck Stops with Apathetic Us
An overwhelming majority of Indians don’t even drink two litres in a year of Pepsi or Coke. At such consumption levels, pesticide contamination in Pepsi and Coke isn’t hazardous. But, pesticides in two litres of water consumed every single day can be hazardous.
Hazardous enough for the US EPA (regulates municipal water), the US Food and Drug Administration, joint committees of the WHO and the FAO and the EU to have established enforceable limits for potable water and, explicitly or implicitly, for all beverages in which water is the primary constituent. Other developed countries have followed these leads. All these countries have taken these steps – in many cases starting over three decades ago – because the toxicological evidence is entirely persuasive.
Innumerable studies have documented the toxic effects of pesticides. Tests are generally conducted on mice, just as with medicines. Understandably, such tests can’t be followed by tests on humans, unlike with medicines. The effects of sustained long-term exposure, even at “sub-threshold levels”, to pesticides aren’t minor. They include birth defects, growth retardation, behavioral abnormalities, musculo-skeletal degradation, immunological deficiencies, liver and kidney damage, brain and central nervous system impairment and cancer. So, toxicologists establish prudently safe levels based on extrapolations. Here are three of the levels, in mg/litre, established by the US EPA for municipal water supply: Arsenic – 0.01, Cyanide – 0.2, lindane, a pesticide – 0.0002 (0.2 ppb). That is how toxic pesticides are. A Coca Cola sample tested by CSE had 14 ppb of lindane! International standards indeed!
Developed countries don’t merely publish limits, they monitor performance against them and enforce them. Here is an example: the UK’s Drinking Water Inspectorate reported in its annual report that, of about three million tests carried out across the country, 99.96% met all EU standards. Chennai’s metro-water supply board says that it tests 500 samples monthly. These results used to be posted on their web site, alongside BIS standards. The last posting is for October 2003! Even the earlier test results do not cover pesticides, arsenic, cyanide or mercury.
Do Something!
The Indian Constitution says, under the Directive Principles of State Policy, (39) Certain principles of policy to be followed by the State – “… (f) that children are given opportunities and facilities to develop in a healthy manner ……”. Use the power of the Constitution.
Here is what we can all do:
Write to or e-mail all the concerned khas aadmies and auraths and ask:
· What are they doing about public health and drinking water quality?
· Why isn’t the National Rural Health Mission acting on drinking water quality?
· Why doesn’t the Panchayati Raj enable every panchayat in the country to set up a pedal-powered water purification facility capable of providing each family in the village with ten litres/day of drinking water meeting EU norms?
· Why aren’t the JPC’s recommendations being implemented immediately?
· Why aren’t the EU norms for drinking water and food products being adopted and made legally binding immediately?
· Why isn’t there mandatory ISI certification of all water treatment plants and food products?
· Why aren’t water-supply departments required to publish their test results monthly, comparing them to BIS standards?
· Why can’t soft-drink manufacturers commit, legally and immediately, to meeting the standards they claim to meet?
· Why not levy a cess of a rupee per litre of pure bottled water and soft drinks and use the proceeds (Rs 1,000 crores/yr.) solely to give pure drinking water to rural India?
Write to your newspapers and ask them to publish quarterly “advertisements” displaying the results of the tests conducted by the local water supply agency. Residential water purification companies should be thrilled to pay for these public-service ads.
Here is some contact information:
Dr. Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister - http//pmindia.nic.in/write/htm
National Advisory Council – http://nac.nic.in/feedback.asp
Dr. Anbumani Ramadoss, Minister for Health and Family Welfare – hfm@alpha.nic.in
Mr. Sharad Pawar, Minister for Agriculture, Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution – am.krishi@nic.in
Mr Mani Shankar Iyer, Minister for Panchayati Raj, Youth Affairs and Sports – msaiyar@hotmail.com
Coca Cola Corporation, USA – www.coca-cola.com
PepsiCo, USA – www.pepsico.com
Let e-mails flow by the millions. But first, please write to Ms Sunita Narain, (Director, CSE, 41 Tughlakabad Institutional Area, New Delhi 110 062) thanking her for CSE’s crusade and asking for a shift in focus to the Aquamorta we all drink.
Therefrom arises my discontent. We, our politicians and our media suffer from a firecracker syndrome concerning news. We pay attention if it is sparkling or loud; we lose interest if it is a long, slow-burning fuse, even if it leads to a munitions warehouse.
Permit me some pedantry, regarding mg/litre and parts per billion. Take three one-litre bottles of distilled water and pour out fifteen drops of water from each. Now add fifteen drops of a liquid toxin, say cobra venom (which attacks humans much like some pesticides), to the first bottle. Shake it vigorously and add fifteen drops of that mixture to the second bottle and shake that vigorously. Finally, add fifteen drops from the second bottle to the third and shake again. The third bottle will now have 0.001 mg/litre or 1ppb of venom. A sip of that mixture will not hurt you. But, would you let your children drink two litres a day of it, for decades to come, knowing the effect to be cumulative?
Politicians First
When the news regarding pesticides in bottled water first broke, over three years ago, the political furor was deafening. Our politicians screamed bloody murder and wanted Coke and Pepsi banned – promptly did so, from their canteen. Then, they set up a Joint Parliamentary Committee, headed by Mr. Sharad Pawar.
This JPC, the first one ever convened to address a public health issue, issued a report just about a year after the Centre for Science and Environment, headed by India’s Rachel Carson, Ms Sunita Narain, first sounded the alarm. Below are some extracts from the JPC report (italics added):
“The Ministry of Health ……. suddenly became alive to the entire issue only after the CSE… published its report ….”
“…… Prevention of Food Adulteration Act, 1954 ….. but no quality standards except for the microbiological contaminant standards for the final soft drinks are specified.”
“It is only recently that the Ministry of Health … issued notification …. prescribing standards of 0.0001 mg/litre for individual pesticides and 0.0005 for total pesticides for packaged drinking water … w.e.f. 1.1.2004.”
“… 181 pesticides are registered ... Committee has noted with dismay that …. MRLs (maximum residue levels) for 71 pesticides only have been fixed …..”
“The Committee has expressed the view that norms for drinking water should be formulated …... It is at the same time very essential that these standards are made legally enforceable. Earnest efforts ….”
The last quote is all the report said about drinking water. We drink some two billion litres of water a day (including in tea, etc.). In comparison, we drink a total of under ten billion litres of bottles water and soft drinks in a year. In other words, we drink more than seventy times as much regular water as bottled water and soft drinks. The US Congress passed the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974. Other developed countries passed similar acts decades ago. Yet, our politicians are still “expressing views” on “earnest efforts” while screaming about American soft drinks. Why waste time formulating norms de novo when numerous countries and respected international bodies have already done so?
Ms Narain understands politicians – the only way she can draw political attention to laws on drinking water is to spotlight American companies. Smt. Sushma Swaraj, having done little as the Health Minister, now attacks the current government. Mr. Anbumani Ramadoss, a doctor and her successor, didn’t even show up to answer questions in parliament. Mr. Pawar is now the minister for agriculture. Farming families, over 60% of India’s population, drink water that is not even filtered. Has he gone beyond “expressing views”, to bat for rural families?
The problem is not just at the Centre. The current government of Tamil Nadu came to power partly by promising free colour television sets. Wouldn’t residential water purification systems have demonstrated greater concern for public welfare? What have the parties on the left done about safe drinking water? Or Mr. Vajpayee, one of our most respected leaders - he has written on parliamentary privilege. Isn’t safe drinking water a public privilege?
The Media
They have covered these issues extensively, even with articles and editorials on the need for safe drinking water. But, the emphasis has overwhelmingly been on Coca-Cola and Pepsi and the implicit tone has been “those Yanks are at it again”.
Editors of this newspaper don’t want to ban colas, since “palliatives don’t provide solutions” - they want to ban pesticides! Are they aware that mosquito-borne diseases are endemic to India, or that cotton-farmer suicides (due to crops devastated by pests) may jump a hundredfold from current levels? Last week, the US Environmental Protection Agency announced a programme that could lead to the elimination of 3,200 applications of certain pesticides, organophosphates and carbamates, and modifications in 1,200 others. It didn’t ban pesticides.
TV, with its format ill suited to serious deliberation, has faired worse. Some channels do an excellent job of raising public awareness on critical issues (e.g. toxins in ayurvedic medicines). However, when they try to do so through live-audience panel shows, they merely launch shouting matches among people who are often unqualified to speak on the subject under discussion. One such show on pesticide contamination amounted to little more than an attack by a PR executive and a pesticide manufacturer on Ms Narain, who was defended by a clueless politician.
There were no public health, medical or water purification professionals to enlighten viewers. The audience was deafened, not enlightened.
Toxin mathlab Coca Cola?
Coke and Pepsi have both said that their Indian soft drinks meet US standards. They have also attacked CSE for saying otherwise and cited government labs which essentially agreed with CSE. Interestingly, reports say that imported samples of Coke and Pepsi tested by CSE did meet US and EU standards. It is not clear whether we should castigate them as recalcitrant renegades or pity their incompetence.
If they are meeting US standards, it is even less clear why they aren’t paying for ads pushing for the immediate adoption of US norms? To be evenhanded, samples of Parle’s and McDowell’s products failed the CSE tests as well.
CSE has estimated the cost of treating bottled water at around 25 paise a litre, against the retail price of about ten rupees. Adsorption through granulated activated charcoal is the treatment specified by the US EPA for reducing pesticide contamination to tolerable levels. Multi-stage household water purifiers use this process. Boiling and micro-filtration will not do the job.
The Buck Stops with Apathetic Us
An overwhelming majority of Indians don’t even drink two litres in a year of Pepsi or Coke. At such consumption levels, pesticide contamination in Pepsi and Coke isn’t hazardous. But, pesticides in two litres of water consumed every single day can be hazardous.
Hazardous enough for the US EPA (regulates municipal water), the US Food and Drug Administration, joint committees of the WHO and the FAO and the EU to have established enforceable limits for potable water and, explicitly or implicitly, for all beverages in which water is the primary constituent. Other developed countries have followed these leads. All these countries have taken these steps – in many cases starting over three decades ago – because the toxicological evidence is entirely persuasive.
Innumerable studies have documented the toxic effects of pesticides. Tests are generally conducted on mice, just as with medicines. Understandably, such tests can’t be followed by tests on humans, unlike with medicines. The effects of sustained long-term exposure, even at “sub-threshold levels”, to pesticides aren’t minor. They include birth defects, growth retardation, behavioral abnormalities, musculo-skeletal degradation, immunological deficiencies, liver and kidney damage, brain and central nervous system impairment and cancer. So, toxicologists establish prudently safe levels based on extrapolations. Here are three of the levels, in mg/litre, established by the US EPA for municipal water supply: Arsenic – 0.01, Cyanide – 0.2, lindane, a pesticide – 0.0002 (0.2 ppb). That is how toxic pesticides are. A Coca Cola sample tested by CSE had 14 ppb of lindane! International standards indeed!
Developed countries don’t merely publish limits, they monitor performance against them and enforce them. Here is an example: the UK’s Drinking Water Inspectorate reported in its annual report that, of about three million tests carried out across the country, 99.96% met all EU standards. Chennai’s metro-water supply board says that it tests 500 samples monthly. These results used to be posted on their web site, alongside BIS standards. The last posting is for October 2003! Even the earlier test results do not cover pesticides, arsenic, cyanide or mercury.
Do Something!
The Indian Constitution says, under the Directive Principles of State Policy, (39) Certain principles of policy to be followed by the State – “… (f) that children are given opportunities and facilities to develop in a healthy manner ……”. Use the power of the Constitution.
Here is what we can all do:
Write to or e-mail all the concerned khas aadmies and auraths and ask:
· What are they doing about public health and drinking water quality?
· Why isn’t the National Rural Health Mission acting on drinking water quality?
· Why doesn’t the Panchayati Raj enable every panchayat in the country to set up a pedal-powered water purification facility capable of providing each family in the village with ten litres/day of drinking water meeting EU norms?
· Why aren’t the JPC’s recommendations being implemented immediately?
· Why aren’t the EU norms for drinking water and food products being adopted and made legally binding immediately?
· Why isn’t there mandatory ISI certification of all water treatment plants and food products?
· Why aren’t water-supply departments required to publish their test results monthly, comparing them to BIS standards?
· Why can’t soft-drink manufacturers commit, legally and immediately, to meeting the standards they claim to meet?
· Why not levy a cess of a rupee per litre of pure bottled water and soft drinks and use the proceeds (Rs 1,000 crores/yr.) solely to give pure drinking water to rural India?
Write to your newspapers and ask them to publish quarterly “advertisements” displaying the results of the tests conducted by the local water supply agency. Residential water purification companies should be thrilled to pay for these public-service ads.
Here is some contact information:
Dr. Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister - http//pmindia.nic.in/write/htm
National Advisory Council – http://nac.nic.in/feedback.asp
Dr. Anbumani Ramadoss, Minister for Health and Family Welfare – hfm@alpha.nic.in
Mr. Sharad Pawar, Minister for Agriculture, Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution – am.krishi@nic.in
Mr Mani Shankar Iyer, Minister for Panchayati Raj, Youth Affairs and Sports – msaiyar@hotmail.com
Coca Cola Corporation, USA – www.coca-cola.com
PepsiCo, USA – www.pepsico.com
Let e-mails flow by the millions. But first, please write to Ms Sunita Narain, (Director, CSE, 41 Tughlakabad Institutional Area, New Delhi 110 062) thanking her for CSE’s crusade and asking for a shift in focus to the Aquamorta we all drink.
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