MADURAI: Even when many areas in the city struggle to get quality drinking water regularly, residents of Iravathanallur ward in Madurai Municipal Corporation (MMC) gets purified drinking water with

A cruel joke has been played out at the expense of the Bhopal victims of the world’s worst industrial disaster. The Supreme Court had ordered the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) to file a report on the status of the ground water contamination at the Union Carbide plant site in Bhopal by June 4, 2012.

The CPCB has treated this entire exercise in a rather lackadaisical fashion and from the six samples tested by them, five were taken from the drinking water supply of the Bhopal Municipal Corporation. The sixth sample was taken from a borewell dug in Street No. 8 and being used by the Ayasha Hotel at Arif Nagar in Bhopal.

If you think you are consuming packaged water and thus you are safe, you may be wrong. The report card of the State Health Department on water samples shows that water could be substandard, even if it is stored in a sealed container.

Of the eight packaged drinking water samples analysed by the Public Health Institute of the department of Health and Family Welfare in June, seven (87.5 per cent) were found to be substandard and thus did not meet the prescribed specification of the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS).

A new water reuse approach being taken by the Coca-Cola Company could save as much as 100bn litres of water annually if implemented across its global bottling plants, says the company.

Latest Planning Report Says State’s Progress Is Off-Track

Jaipur: The latest report for Rajasthan on the millennium development goals (MDG) released by the state planning board revealed that the state is likely to miss its targeted goals set for 2015. The state has performed poorly in many of the indicators under the MDG report released on Thursday. The progress in child mortality rate, maternal health, gender equality and empowerment of woman and marginalized communities is completely off track. The statistics noted in the report for Rajasthan are painting a grim picture of the state’s development.