Arsenic crisis in Bangladesh - suggestions to combat the situation
Dipankar Chakraborti
School of Environmental Studies, Jadavpur University, Calcutta
- 700 032, India
To combat the present arsenic crisis, we badly need the following:
- Proper watershed management
- Utilisation of our huge number of water bodies with people's participation
- Rain water harvesting
- The people should be made aware of the arsenic calamity and they must
be made to realise that it is not a curse of god, or the consequence of
the 'wrath of god'
- We must understand that, safe water, nutritious food and physical exercise
are the only medicines for chronic arsenic toxicity at present
- The scientific community and medical people all over the world must
come forward to find a solution to the problem that has put at risk 100
million people only in West Bengal and Bangladesh.
Working on West Bengal's arsenic calamity for last ten years even now
we feel we are at the tip of the iceberg. Thus we need to know as early
as possible the real magnitude of the arsenic calamity in Bangladesh. For
that other than district level work we need in depth semi-micro and micro-level
studies to get an idea of the magnitude of the situation at union and village
levels.
According to WHO, the possibility of getting skin lesions exists among
those drinking 1.0 mg of arsenic per day for several years. And our analytical
report on water (about 10000) jointly with Dhaka Community Hospital indicates
that a large sum of population is consuming above 1.0 mg of arsenic per
day. Our thousands of hair and nail analyses from the affected villages
indicate that 70-80 % of population has higher arsenic body burden. Thus
many may not be showing arsenical skin lesions but may be sub-clinically
affected. Further, if it is true that arsenic toxicity appears after several
years of exposure, then the picture may actually be for more grim than
it appears at present, and children our future generations are at a greater
risk.
The mistake that we made in the past and are persisting with it even
today is the merciless exploitation of groundwater for irrigation without
ever trying to adopt effective watershed management to harness our huge
surface water resources and rain water. In Bangladesh, we have large area
of wetlands, a huge area of flooded river basins, innumerable ox-bow lakes
and big lagoons. Proper watershed management and the use of these water
bodies for pisiculture, duck-breeding, and growing vegetables on their
banks with people's participation could actually help the villagers become
more prosperous. Instead of taking this course, we are digging more and
more tubewells knowing fully well (from West Bengal experience) that in
the long run these tube-wells run the risk of contamination.
Even for irrigation, we are digging deep tubewells when we are unable
to get water from the shallow tubewells during summer. Recently, a veteran
geologist has in an article captioned against such reckless use of groundwater
and has cited its disastrous consequences. It must be realised that water
held in deep aquifers takes decades, even centuries, to accumulate, and
recent rainfall does not replenish this resource. Recent isotope studies
carried out in Rajasthan, India have indicated that such water can be 6000
to 10,000 years old.
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