Rizwanullah Khan carries two steel katoris [bowls]; one that he purchased from Jodia Bazaar and the other that can hold both cold and hot beverages. The latter has the Quranic Ayat-e-Shifa [Verse of Healing] inscribed on it. It’s the second one he uses to drink water from when he’s on the go.
“I just fill up water from just about anywhere — a mosque, a public tap — say Bismillah and drink it!” says the 49-year old teacher, who teaches geometric art at the University of Karachi’s Visual Studies Department. “I have complete faith in God that no harm will come to me if I drink any type of water from that bowl.”
Since his primary mode of transport is a bicycle, he needs to get rehydrated often. And while he may drink water from any source, he says, his children carry water bottles around that are filled with boiled water from home. “We boil, strain and store the water for drinking purposes in a matka [earthenware pitcher].” This water is supplied to their home in the upscale Defence Housing Authority locality through tankers.
For Khan and his wife, though, health is not a primary concern. Living according to certain values that are a mix of “hippie/green and Sufi” that he and his sister imbibed from their parents, and which have now rubbed on to his wife too, theirs is a battle against anything that smells remotely of “corporatocracy.” And in particular, against companies that have “commodified” water, selling it by “running aquifers dry” or “buying lakes in Africa”, for example.
An estimated 15-20 percent of Pakistanis now use bottled water because of fears of unsafe drinking water supplied in the system. But the social, environmental and economic costs of this trend are ignored...
To the urbanised, consumerist and upwardly mobile bottled-water fed generation, people such as Khan are an anomaly and his lifestyle cumbersome, tedious, even strange.
“I don’t think I am courageous enough to take my chance with drinking tap water from any city in Pakistan, especially not in Karachi!” says Salman Ahmed, a young entrepreneur.
And that may be the response one would get from a majority of the people residing in most urban centres in Pakistan, not just Karachi, which according to reports, is supplied the most contaminated potable water. Last year, over 83 percent of water in 14 of the 29 districts in Sindh was unsafe for drinking with Karachi scoring the highest in contamination at nearly 91 percent.
The June 2018 Pakistan Council of Research for Water Resources (PCRWR) report attributed 45 percent of infant deaths in Pakistan to diarrhoea and about 60 percent to overall infectious waterborne diseases in Pakistan.
But turning to the bottle because of health fears is not just found in Pakistan alone; globally more and more people are consuming water from the bottle, even where governments say tap water is safe. Today it’s the fastest-growing beverage market in the world, valued at US$147 billion per year.
In deep waters
One would think bottled water is a fad with the rich but that notion does not hold in reality.
The fear of waterborne disease is so widespread in a city as mammoth as Karachi that even those living in katchi abadis [squatter settlements] buy the un-branded blue plastic barrels from their nearby neighbourhood grocery stores, thinking it’s cleaner than that supplied from the municipality or private tankers.
Consider the case of 20-something Aasia Kamran, a young mother who works as domestic help. Living in Shirin Jinnah Colony, near Karachi’s Clifton area, Kamran has never given her two-year-old son water from the 19-litre blue plastic barrel.
“I only use the 1.5-litre branded bottle, she says, “because the doctor told me very strictly never to give him any other or he will fall very sick!”.
Their use of water is very judicious, in part due to the costs involved.
“A bottle costs me 60 rupees each and it lasts my son a week,” adds Kamran. “A barrel costs us 70 rupees each and lasts me and my husband two weeks.”
This differentiation is for potable water needs; the rest of their needs, including tea and for cooking (because they boil it), are met with water from tankers.
But the water that Kamran buys comes from groundwater and costs the company next to nothing. What she is paying for is actually the cost of drawing water from the source, the raw material used in the manufacture of the plastic bottle, energy used in treatment of water, energy used in cleaning, filling, labelling, refrigerating and, marketing, and transportation cost to retailers and then to the consumer.
A source from the water and beverage industry, on condition of anonymity, tells Eos: “On average, the production cost is about 30 percent. Trade discounts, selling and distribution expenses are 29 percent. Retailer and distribution margin is 15 percent.” In addition, Kamran probably pays the 17 percent tax imposed by the government on the company as well as the five to six percent profit the company is likely making off selling water.
But, argue various companies, just because there is no fee for the abstraction of water, it does not mean that water comes to them completely free.
“There is a high cost that goes into setting up an industrial plant, ensuring hygiene and quality of the water as well as the logistics,” justifies the water and beverage industry. “In fact,” says a source working in a multinational bottling company, “logistics comprise the major chunk of the cost. About 40 percent to 44 percent versus any other packaged food product.”
Many researchers point to the high water footprint (packaging, treatment, bottling, sanitisation) of the industry. According to one by FreshWaterWatch, plastic bottles need three times the water that they can actually hold. This means that three litre of water is needed to make a water bottle that only holds one litre!
Terming this to be an exaggeration, those working in the water and beverage industry claim that in Pakistan, on average, it takes at least 1.7 litres of water to produce one litre of bottled water. In fact, says the industry source: “There are some companies that are more efficient compared to local players because of the technologies and tools they have access to.”
Sterile does not equal safe