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Comment by BjoernKW | Hacker News Reader

If I'm not mistaken he's talking about India. It's common advice (for travellers at least) to only drink bottled water in India.

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He mentions 2 decades ago it being fine, so I presume not India. The advice to only drink bottled in India was common 20 years ago too.

India, Calcutta. But now all over India hardly one will be drinking tap water straight away. Some filter process is always done at point of drinking.

These days its so sad to find every shop ordering a container of filtered drinking water. Earlier it was available through taps. Now no one trusts tap water.

Are your fellow citizens not pissed about this? Is there similar environmental movements as in the US 60 years ago? (And don't be too discouraged; Silent Spring was published in the early 60s and Love Canal occurred in the late 70s I think. The Cuyahoga River caught on fire multiple times, the last spurring the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.)

It still is, We don't drink tap water in Bangalore either. Very very rare to see folks drinking water straight out of the tap - the water supply isn't potable.

Most urban households have some kind of filtration system in place. The water supply infra is quite bad, with frequent contamination due to leakage.

If it's India they have a problem of arsenic contamination of groundwater, plus bacterial contamination of surface water.

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