Kerala HC asks single judge to decide bottled water pricing issue within 2 months

Kochi: The Kerala High Court on Tuesday asked a single judge to finally decide within two months a plea challenging the state government's decisions to declare bottled water as an essential item and cap its price at Rs 13 per litre. The single judge's December 15, 2021 interim order had come on a batch of three petitions filed challenging a 2019 notification which declared bottled water as an essential item and the subsequent 2020 decision fixing the cap of Rs 13 per litre on packaged drinking water. The single judge had said that the state lacks jurisdiction or power to declare packaged drinking water as an essential article and therefore, its order fixing the price of bottled water at Rs 13 per litre was "legally unsustainable". The single judge had further said that the state government "lacks jurisdiction in declaring packaged drinking water as an essential article under the Kerala Essential Articles Control Act,1986 in the light of the Food Safety Act 2006".