No access to safe drinking water for 50 million people in urban India: Report

NEW DELHI: A report by UNICEF India revealed that 50 million people from 15 cities of India do not have any access to safe and affordable drinking water. Healthy drinking water in undeniably one of the essential components in terms of ensuring good health of a person, for it helps channelize the metabolic processes of the body. Moreover, amidst the current second wave of coronavirus pandemic in India, clean drinking water becomes more than significant because health experts believe hydration works as an important factor in helping the body fight the SARS-CoV-2 infection.

However, the UNICEF India report stated that the scarcity of safe drinking water in cities has become as high as the density of population in the urban India. Manjari Chandra, Consultant Nutritional Medicine, said that it is of utmost important to realise the purity of water that one is consuming. She said that usually while checking the purity of water, if people find it to be looking clean, they assume it to be safe for drinking, but she stressed that water looking clean might not always be safe for drinking.

The report found that the majority of population in urban India is consuming water from privately owned water sources. Moreover, due to the hustle and bustle of hectic urban life, people living in urban India rarely notice the discrepancy in the water pipelines of their own houses, which often cause water contamination. Prof (Dr) Sanjay Rai, President, Indian Public Health Association, said that urban population often ends up not paying any attention to maintenance and cleaning of water tanks placed on their roofs or underground, which ultimately contaminates the water right before its consumption.

The report found water supplied to Indian cities from major sources like tube well to be unsafe for they are often the carriers of waterborne diseases. In Indian cities, people are now widely using water purifiers with Reverse Osmosis (RO) technology, to treat and filter water before consumption. It is used for home water treatment to remove salts, chemical toxins, organic contaminants, dyes, pesticides, and microbes. However, Dr Rai added that even though such filters do not produce any harmful chemicals, water consumed after treatment through RO process is devoid of various useful minerals found in water otherwise, thus harming the people anyhow.