The establishment of the new Guyana Water Inc. (GWI) water bottling plant at Pouderoyen is a pragmatic response by the state-run entity to a market demand for the commodity and is not designed to provide unfair competition to business enterprises, according to GWI Chief Executive Officer Karan Singh.
The company’s $3.5m plant which was commissioned two weeks ago will be followed by other such outlets which the company intends to set up at various locations, Singh told Stabroek Business.
Asked to comment on the irony of GWI entering the bottled water business given the fact that its substantive responsibility is supplying consumers with potable water, Singh said that that company saw no reason why it should not enter into a commercial venture in which there was high demand.
The water company’s Chief Executive Officer told Stabroek Business that the demand for bottled water had nothing to do with the quality of the water being provided by the GWI. According to Singh the assurances which GWI continued to give regarding the quality of the water provided to consumers was based on reliable scientific tests. “The increase in the consumption of bottled water has to do with acquired taste,” he added.
According to Singh local water vendors were purchasing water from GWI at the metered rate and passing it through an inexpensive filtration pro-cess to remove the chlorine before marketing the product at several times the price for which they bought it. He said that the company was also aware of cases in which some smaller bottled water vendors were buying water from GWI in 450-gallon black tanks at around 1.5 cents per gallon and selling it at $20.00 per gallon. “What the consumer does not know in many of these cases is that the bottled water that they are buying is the identical product that is coming from GWI’s treatment plant. “The only difference is that they are drinking from a bottle,” he added. He said that the reason for the aversion to tap water in Guyana has to do with the taste of the chlorine. “There is no toxicity issue here,” Singh said.
Meanwhile Singh told Stabroek Business that GWI is aware of cases in which bottled water vendors are stealing water from the company to run their operations. He named two enterprises against whom the company had taken action including one which he said was securing its water from another GWI consumer in the area. Singh told Stabroek Business that GWI had alerted that seemingly unwitting customer to the problem and had urged that it take action to bring an end to the practice. In the second case Singh said that the offending entity had claimed that the source of its water was a well that it had established but a check of the authorities had revealed that no permission had been sought or granted for such a well.
The company’s West Bank bottled water facility competes with two other privately-run enterprises in the area both of which receive their supplies from the company. “Under the law we have no obligation to provide those facilities with water for commercial purposes. What we have decided, however, is that we will continue to provide them with water and that we will charge them at the commercial rate”, he added.
