The use of alternative safe water options
to mitigate the arsenic problem in Bangladesh: a community perspective
Md. Jakariya. M.Sc. Thesis,
Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Aug 2000
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
While the extent of the water crisis is well known in areas
such as the Middle East, there are many professionals who believe that
freshwater quality will become the principal limiting factor for sustainable
development in many countries early in this century (Ongley, 1999). “Everything
living is created from water” is an ancient quotation, which closely describes
the importance of water (anon., 1977). Humans have been concerned with water
from the very beginning of their existence. The quantity of water on earth
appears enormous when it is considered that more than two-thirds of earth’s
surface is covered with water. However, 97.2% is seawater, 2.05% is frozen
water, and only 0.65% is fresh water on land and /or in the atmosphere (anon.,
1977). Over 98% of available global fresh water is stored as groundwater in the
saturated zones within pores and fractures in rocks (Hiscock, 1994; Jones,
1997). Consequently, groundwater comprises a significant proportion of the water
resources in most countries and is an important component of the natural
environment (IHP, 1991). For example, groundwater accounts for about 97% of
rural drinking water supplies in Bangladesh (UNICEF, 1999). Groundwater often
provides a water supply that is more reliable in quantity and more stable in
quality than surface water and thus has economic and operational advantages due
to reduced treatment requirements (Robins, 1990).
Until the early 1970s, the more than 100 million inhabitants
of Bangladesh and
neighboring West Bengal drank from shallow hand-dug wells,
rivers and ponds. But pollution was causing epidemics of diarrhea, aemebiasis,
polio, typhoid and other water-borne diseases. This persuaded aid agencies such
as UNICEF and others to spend tens of millions of pounds sinking tube wells -
steel pipes fitted with simple hand pumps- to tap the plentiful and apparently
clean water in the sand and silt of the Ganges flood plain. Following this
example, the rural people of Bangladesh later sank many more tube wells privately. The number of
tube wells present today is estimated between 3-5
million whereas it was only about 50,000 during the British colonial rule
(UNICEF 1999). But the recent discovery of arsenic in groundwater has ruined
this decade-long success and the access to safe drinking water has now dropped
to almost 80% (UNICEF, 1999). Collin Devis, Chief of Water and Environmental
Sanitation of UNICEF rightly mentions that Bangladesh has become the victim of
its own success (Independent, 2000). Therefore, it is very important that any
environmental policy be developed according to proper scientific and
socio-economic foundations otherwise things may go wrong at a tremendous expense
without achieving any gain (Trudgill, 1990).
The following table gives some basic statistics about the
severity of the arsenic problem:
Table 1: Basic statistics about Bangladesh and the Arsenic
Problem
|
Number of total districts
Total area of Bangladesh
Number of total
population
GDP per capita (1998)
Drinking water standard for arsenic (WHO)
Drinking water standard for arsenic (Bangladesh)
Number of districts
surveyed for arsenic concentration
No. of districts having arsenic above
maximum permissible limit
Population at risk of the affected districts
Potentially exposed population
Number of patients suffering from
arsenocosis
Total number of tube wells
Total number of affected tube wells
|
64
148,393 km˛
120 million
US$ 260
0.01 mg/l
0.05 mg/l
64
59
75
million
24 million
7000-10,000
3-4 million
1.12 million
|
Source: ACIC, 1998
Apart from the health concern indicated in the table, a
number of social problems are associated with this hazard that have far-reaching
consequences for millions of rural people. The problem is intensified when we
observe that the distribution of arsenic in groundwater is not uniform
throughout the country - that is if one tube well is contaminated with
arsenic the next tube well (that may be a few hundred meters away) is not
necessarily also contaminated. Therefore, blanket testing of all the existing
hand-tube wells of Bangladesh and simultaneous provision of alternative safe
water options to the affected communities are the topmost priorities in order to
alleviate the problem (see Figure 1 for the distribution of arsenic in the
groundwater of Bangladesh).
Figure 1 : Arsenic Contaminated Areas
in Bangladesh
BRAC, the largest non-governmental development organization in Bangladesh, is testing a community-based arsenic mitigation programme in two upazilas
(Administrative unit, equivalent to sub-district) of Bangladesh. To mitigate
the arsenic problem, a number of alternative safe water options are available in
Bangladesh. Some of these options are based on surface water and some are based
on treating the arsenic-contaminated water.
The availability of different alternative safe water options
is very important not only to evaluate and select the best options for a
particular community but also because of the physio-cultural and socio-economic
variation among communities. At the same time national policy and the influence
of interest groups on bureaucrats and policy makers play an important role in
promoting certain mitigation options. Although political decisions and the
decisions of interest groups play an important role in implementing particular
measures, in the long run socio-cultural factors and community interests play
the dominant role in sustainable implementation of some new ideas or the
acceptance of something new by the community. It has been observed that problems
and prospects of communities depend on the communities’ perception of
particular subjects which in turn depends on information and knowledge,
technology, socio-economic and cultural characteristics, severity of problems,
and exposure to the outside world.
It was observed during field visits that the percentage of
acceptance of different alternative safe water options was not only
unsatisfactory but also varied greatly among the communities in the two upazilas.
In one area, the community was very much concerned about getting water from
alternative safe water options but in another area, people were reluctant on
getting water from arsenic-free sources. It was observed that community is not
only heterogeneous on a regional scale but also on a small-scale concentration
of people. This heterogeneous characteristic of communities along with some
other local factors made the response pattern different and the acceptance of
different alternative safe water options by the communities low. Therefore, the
main intention of this study was to find the factors responsible for a different
response pattern of community regarding the provided alternative safe water
options, in order to develop a sustainable implementation policy for the
alternative safe water options in other parts of the arsenic-affected areas of
Bangladesh.
|
