There is an increasing ...

There is an increasing concern of drinking water due to its aesthetic view such as colour, taste and odour as well as increasing knowledge on the effects of poor water quality to health and disease. On the other hand, the existence and marketing of bottled water plays a role. Adverts created by bottled water companies influence people very strongly. The lack of information and transparency of water quality authorities regarding the assurance of water quality also makes the difference.

More and more people from developing regions travel to developed regions learning the concern, knowledge and transparency of people there with regards to the effects of pollutants. The attitude of water companies and lack of willingness of public to pay for water treatment is like a chicken and egg situation. Companies would not do more to treat as they know public create uproar if water price is raised; and public would not pay for they know water will not be treated any more advance. Even if water treatment is advanced, there is corruption and lack of knowledge or poor practices that would mess up things. The water companies further sub-contract pipe repair and treatment maintenance to companies set-up by people from lower socioeconomic status. As everyone wants to make money, a poor job is done. Scouring or flushing of pipes is not done during re-connection of pipes after a pipe-burst incident. In installation of new pipes, a substandard pipe quality is used to replace the pipe of expected quality in order to increase margin of profit from this work. In addition, people from low and middle-socioeconomic status on the overall are more concerned about survival due to rising cost of living rather than quality of life. To those concerned about quality of life, water is not directly related to quality of life in their eyes.

However, put aside all this, water in developed countries is not necessarily better than water in developing regions, the main difference is that there is pressure on authorities/companies to provide information to public and provide better treatment. There is a continuous pressure and threat by public to water suppliers/companies and to the authorities in charge. Thus authorities/companies want to convince public by providing information and persistently improving as a sense of responsibility and their own consciousness to do better. It is attitude and culture of both authorities/companies and public that play a role.

Another important attitude and/or cultural habit of people in developing countries is that they love to follow trends learned from developing countries. When developed countries develop something for use, people in the developing countries want to have it (out of trend!). However, once a habit has begun, they have difficulty to stop it even when the developed countries "no" longer practice or use it upon finding undesired results or upon finding ways to better the practices/technologies.

In general, people in developing countries take longer time to obtain accurate and credible knowledge, reason that people in developing countries lack reading habits. They obtain knowledge through social media which could be inaccurate or exaggerated or misconstrued knowledge. Hence they take bottled water for granted and do not understand or study the implications of their dependence to bottled water which also has its disadvantages. Once started, hard to stop -- so habitual and trendy. As I have explained, there are myriads of issues. I hope this was informative.