The arsenic threat

The WHO had warned Bangladesh of the arsenic threat back in 1993 and the premonition is apparently coming true. It poses a grave risk to people's health in vast areas which are lacking in access to sources of safe water supply. The Department of Public Health and Engineering (DPHE) has launched its arsenic mitigation plan, but obviously it is overtaken by the progress of contamination. Water in the affected areas has been found to have a much higher arsenic content than is permissible. According to WHO, the presence of 50 microgram of arsenic in water (the permissible limit being only 10) in some places in the country has the foreboding of a full-scale public health disaster.

What is most striking about the whole arsenic contamination management scheme is the lack of orchestrated efforts to face the challenge. Reports say that in some areas people are drinking water from tubewells that were once marked 'red' to be avoided. This is a clear case of a grave danger being overlooked or, more likely, people have no other source to collect water from. Then there have been reports on availability of law-cost devices that could be used to purify contaminated water. But it is not known why use of such devices has not gained much popularity. Again, it is clear that the concerned departments have failed to launch the needed awareness-building campaign.

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Too much extraction of ground water, and the resultant lowering of the water table, has been held responsible for arsenic contamination of water. However, it has not been possible so far to arrange safe water supplies, though the root cause behind arsenic contamination has been common knowledge for quite a while now. In our context, the problem is shared by the neighbouring Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura and it would be worthwhile to have an integrated regional approach duly underpinned by international assistance to deal with it, or at least lessen its impact on the masses, particularly in the rural areas.