Luxury of bottled water.

A few days ago, "The Supreme Court...declined to entertain a PIL (public interest litigation) seeking enforcement of global standards for packaged drinking water, terming it as a fit case of 'luxury litigation' in a country where a large populace lacks access to basic drinking water." TNIE. "People do not have drinking water; the quality of bottled water will come later on," said Chief Justice Surya Kant. "The attitude that just because most Indians are poor, we should not have high standards for human life explains why our roads are dangerous and why trains derail; our standards are low at almost every level." "The poor themselves have higher standards than India has for them. This is why so many of them reject government schools in most states, " and "Some poor and lower-middle-class families spend a considerable portion of their income on sending their kids to private schools," wrote Manu Joseph. Keeping people poor makes them dependent on the government for subsidies. "The population covered by social protection systems has increased from 22% in 2016 to 64.3% in 2025,..data released by statistical ministry showed. TOI. That allows the government to dictate to the people. Beggars, after all, can't be choosers. "For decades, the Indian state has communicated less as a facilitator and more as a scolder-in-chief. All-caps circulars that begin with 'WHEREAS' and end with 'penal consequences'." "Notices that seem designed not to inform, but to unnerve," wrote Partha Sinha. While Mr Joseph is right about using poverty for wretched services, he is mistaken about our demand for privacy when he writes "how a class of people who have no qualms about giving their biometric data to the US government for a mere visit tried to sabotage India's biometric identity project, Aadhaar." Firstly, there are millions of Indians who have never visited the US, and have no wish to, but they cannot avoid living in India. Secondly, only humans have a need for privacy, animals, birds and fish are happily naked  (pexels. com) and perform all biological functions in the open. Human beings are born within walls in hospitals, live their entire lives within walls in homes and travel enclosed in walls in cars, trains or planes (freepik.com). Even destitute refugees, fleeing the civil war in Sudan, have constructed flimsy hovels (istockphoto.com), which will provide little protection from the weather, but do provide privacy. Saying that Indians do not need privacy is saying that Indians are animals. Indeed, humans are animals, in the same group as primates - monkeys and apes. Australian Museum. The problem is that humans have the right to kill other animals, birds and fish. "Every year in the United States, approximately 9 billion 'broiler' chickens are killed for their flesh." (roosterhaus.org). That is 17,000 chickens killed every minute, 300 every second. There are recipes to cook even the deadly poisonous rattlesnake. Insidehook. Equating Indians with animals by denying them privacy is the very reason why potholes claimed 2161 lives in 2023 (TOI) and diarrhoea, which is primarily due to dirty water, kills aound 300,000 children every year (IJCM). Air pollution has made Delhi famous as the most polluted capital city in the world (CNN) but the Union government asserted in Parliament that "there is no conclusive evidence establishing a direct link between higher air pollution levels and lung disease (HT)." Poor people are vote bank (wikipedia). Privacy will provide better services. To all.