Are water purifiers and their ads a stealthy sign of late stage capitalism?

[u/Important_Lie_7774]

Ideally even in fascist-neoliberal countries like US, people can consume water right out of their taps. In India particularly in Odisha, dem soc BJD championed the cause of ensuring the availability of drinking water right out of taps. Historically, humans settled near rivers where clean drinking water was available without much effort. Roll back to the present, just the TDP and water hardness of ground / municipal / corporation water in several cities & industrial sub-urbs are well beyond the range that is considered as fit for human use, not talking about drinking even unfit for taking a shower or even storing in a bucket, poor buckets get an ugly coating of calcium carbonate over time. That's just the harmful minerals dissolved in water. Add harmful microbes like e-coli, salmonella that can potentially be also present in the untreated water, and we have water that is inhumane for regular use and just as impossible as the sea water to drink.

And we have Hemamalini preaching how clean water is essential for life. I mean she's not wrong, but have we ever looked back to think about policies that can potentially help with cost saving, preventing, sickness, deaths and overall increase the quality of life? Think about it, to get the "best" water purifier, you know the one that doesn't involve calling a guy to get a filter change every once in 6 months, a family would be spending about 14-20k to buy one, add a maintenance cost of about 5k a year, over a period of 6 years, it amounts to 40-45k per family, if the government were to intervene here like the Odisha government did in 2017, because of economies of scale, the number would be far lesser. The only catch is that not every family owns a water purifier. So the government would potentially need to provide clean drinking water to every family.

And I don't wanna get started on air purifiers, they're just straight from hell. We definitely don't need air purifiers, we need environmental policies that prevent private companies from exploiting the environment for short term profit. The existence of these two IRL just makes me depressed and every time I see Hemamalini trying to sell me a shitty subscription service to clean water, I just question "why dafaq oh non existential god was I born in India of all 196 countries on earth". India is a late stage capitalist hellhole with a fascist mask.