Bottled water is big business in Qatar, and although experts say the desalinated water available through municipal supply is potable, the consumption of branded water has been increasing in line with the increase in population.
It is widely believed that the very officials who publicly advocate the use of tap water for drinking use the "safer" bottled versions in private and at home.
No one knows if such talk has any vestige of truth but suspicions that influential lobbies of bottled water producers might be behind these rumours are galore.
But despite experts maintaining that bottled water is devoid of oxygen and contains minerals and other ingredients in proportions that could be hazardous and might cause harm to the user, more and more people prefer it.
"There is social status attached to water. While a low-income worker has absolutely no qualms or worries drinking tap water, people in middle and upper income brackets seldom use tap water for drinking," said a restaurant owner.
And citizens, in particular, show disregard for tap water and think it is good only for non-drinking purposes. No one has ever seen a local drinking tap water, said a restaurant worker.
While importers of bottled water say they occasionally confront difficulties in getting consignments cleared by the public health authorities and claim the latter take samples at random for lab tests and release stocks in four to five days, no one knows if Qatar has fixed any standards to closely monitor the proportion in which minerals and other ingredients have been used in a particular brand of so-called mineral water.
The focus here is on the contents of bottled water and not the proportion in which the ingredients have been used, say experts. They say if there are standards, they should be made public through awareness campaigns so that people know if they are any good and follow international norms.
Experts claim that bottled water is devoid of oxygen so it is not good for consumption.
Then, there are other serious issues linked to branded water and one of them is the use of plastic bottles and their storage, especially by small neighbourhood stores, during the peak summer monthsMany small shopkeepers tend to keep their stock of bottled water exposed to the sun, especially during extreme heat and humidity, with no official storage guidelines in place.
Users also tend to ignore such practices and they hardly wonder if exposure to extreme heat can cause any damage to the branded water, particularly as the bottle is made of plastic.
The same is true of tap water. Experts claim it is potable and better than the bottled water, but one occasionally hears of pollutants and wonders if the claims are authentic.
Officials, though, say that to ensure that the tap water is clean, storage tanks within homes must be cleaned regularly. And as for the civic pipeline network that crisscrosses the country, totalling more than 5,000 kilometres in length, large stretches of it that were installed years ago are being replaced.
Experts say people must use ordinary, and not highly sophisticated and expensive filtration devices to clean the tap water, for in the case of the latter much of the natural properties of water are lost.
© The Peninsula 2010
