Comment by vladgur
3 days ago
Any idea why that is? Why is safety of tap water high(I hope) priority in some parts of the world and not the others?
Is it simply the economics of water purification and delivery or something else?
3 days ago
Any idea why that is? Why is safety of tap water high(I hope) priority in some parts of the world and not the others?
Is it simply the economics of water purification and delivery or something else?
The price of clean water is at least an order of magnitude less than the price of electricity, but the cost of creating a water grid is probably more expensive than the electricity grid.
You will notice that many of the countries with unsafe tap water also have electricity reliability problems. If the economics of electricity don't work, then the economics of safe water don't work at all.
It's expensive to control the quality of water from source all the way to tap. Just having visible clean running water is hard.
Bottled (mineral) water is a big business in Indonesia. Not sure if "people" are incentivized to change that anytime soon.
I don't think there's any conspiracy like this. It's just economic + (lack of) beauracracy. Installing and maintaining a functioning potable water supply across an entire country is expensive, but even harder is setting and maintaining standards.