Rajahmundry: Even as the state government comes up with a grandiose scheme to ensure supply of mineral water at Rs 2 per a can of 20 litres under NTR Sujala Sravanthi scheme, but it is poorly equipped to implement it with regard to infrastructure to test especially the water samples at regular intervals in the state. With the people prefering to drink only purified water, the mineral water plants have mushroomed in the district. These agencies dig-up bore-wells illegally and extract water and purify it in an unscientific manner and supply to the end users.
The law enforcing authorities including the food safety and standards authority, municipalities or municipal corporations and rural water supply do not have adequate man power and mechanism to find out unauthorized water purifying plants, collect water samples and send them for analysis to the laboratories, resulting in a large number of such agencies coming up.
Though each unit of the supplier of packaged drinking water is supposed to be inspected to find out if they possess the mandatory ISI or BIS certification, the officials fail to do so.
The food safety and standards authority occasionally registers cases against them but it fails to serve as a deterrent. Under the new water scheme, it is expected that at least a minimum of 1,000 water purifying units will be set up in each district in addition to the existing ones either in urban or rural areas and the state government is not having adequate mechanism to keep tab on them.
Moreover, the state food laboratory located in Hyderabad where the water samples are sent for analysis, was bifurcated between the two state with the same manpower and equipment. Though some regional labs are located in Eluru, Vizag, Guntur and Kurnool, they are not fully equipped to carry out analysis of water samples.
However, officials say that as they were facilitating setting up of reverse osmosis and ultraviolet water plants, there was no need for such an analysis and say that the local level labs were also available to test the water samples.
