The Hindu : Norms for bottled water made stringent

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Feb 11, 2003

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National

Norms for bottled water made stringent

By Gargi Parsai

NEW DELHI FEB. 10. The Ministry of Food, Civil Supplies and Consumer Affairs has written to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare to update its Prevention of Food Adulteration Act to bring it in line with the new standards set for packaged/bottled drinking water.

This has come about after the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) revised its norms last Saturday for packaged drinking water and made them stringent to bring them at par with international standards. This was after the Centre of Science and Environment found out that the pesticide residual presence in bottled water of most brands was higher than accepted international standards.

The bureau has now decided to adopt European standards, which are more stringent. The individual pesticide residue should now not exceed 0.1 micron (i.e. one part in a billion) and the total pesticide residue should not be beyond 0.5 micron (i.e. 5 parts in a billion).

The standards being adopted so far by the BIS were considered "vague" as it failed to specify what it meant by "non-detectable" pesticide level. Under the new specifications, companies will have to use the sophisticated "capillary method" to do the pesticide tests. A notification to this effect will be issued soon.

Meanwhile, the committee set up by the Food Minister, Sharad Yadav, to probe the issue of poor specifications for bottled water will submit its report in three weeks.

On Saturday, the Science and Technology Minister, Murli Manohar Joshi, wrote to the Prime Minister seeking his intervention to ensure that the laws on testing packaged/bottled water were made stringent and in line with international standards "in the interest of public health".

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