Arsenic, industrial pollution, salinity, decrease in groundwater level major reasons. Around 26 million people in Bangladesh do not have access to “improved” drinking water, say Unicef and the World Health Organisation.
Bangladesh is among the 10 countries that are home to almost two-thirds of the global population but do not have access to improved drinking water sources, according to estimates of the two global bodies.
They disclosed the data up to 2013 yesterday on the occasion of the World Water Day today.Unicef says women and girls are disproportionately affected by the lack of access to safe water. An estimated 71% of the burden of drinking water collection is being shouldered by women and girls.
“We have had to consume malodorous water from tube wells for the last five years. We also found algae in tube wells,” Nazrul Islam of Gonergaon village under Shilmandi union of Narsingdi district told the Dhaka Tribune on Thursday.
People in at least six unions in Narsingdi had been suffering from this problem, the shopkeeper said, adding that local people believed that discharge of industrial waste from nearby factories had led to the situation.
“We have to drink this water as there is no other alternative sources,” he said.
One of the MDG targets for Bangladesh is to bring 89% of the country’s population under the coverage of safe drinking water.
In Bangladesh, arsenic contamination, industrial pollution, saline intrusion in ground water in the coastal belt, contamination of river water and decrease in ground water level in many parts were major reasons for the shortage of safe water, Professor M Feroze Ahmed, a water expert, told the Dhaka Tribune yesterday.
The former teacher of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, now vice-chancellor of Stamford University, said the situation was worst in hilly and char areas.
According to the joint monitoring programme of the WHO and Unicef, water supply coverage in Bangladesh increased from 78% in 1990 to 98% in 2006. However, arsenic contamination of 22% of the tube wells in the country proportionately lowered the service coverage to 78%.
The latest multiple indicator survey of Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics in 2009 revealed that access to improved source of water adjusted for arsenic contamination had increased 86%.
There is still more than 20 million people drinking water that contains arsenic above the Bangladesh standard for drinking water – 50 parts per billion. Close to 90% of these people live in rural areas and 5 million of them live in areas where 80% sources are contaminated with arsenic.
Increasing saline intrusion in ground water in the coastal belt, lowering of the ground water level, which is more serious in hilly areas including the Chittagong Hill Tracts in the southeast and some parts of Sylhet in the northeast, make access to potable water a big challenge.
The nine other countries and their population without sufficient access to safe drinking water in the Unicef-WHO finding are: China (108 million), India (99 million), Nigeria (63 million), Ethiopia (43 million), Indonesia (39 million), Democratic Republic of the Congo (37 million), United Republic of Tanzania (22 million), Kenya (16 million) and Pakistan (16 million).
According to the Unicef-WHO estimates up to 2013, a staggering 768 million people do not have access to safe drinking water across the globe, causing hundreds of thousands of children to fall ill and die each year.
Most of the people without access to pure drinking water are poor and live in remote rural areas or urban slums.
Unicef says 1,400 children aged under five die every day from diarrhoeal diseases linked to lack of safe water and adequate sanitation and hygiene.
“Every child, rich or poor, has the right to survive, the right to health, the right to a future,” Sanjay Wijesekera, head of Unicef’s global water, sanitation and hygiene programmes, said in a statement yesterday.
“The world should not rest until every single man, woman and child has the water and sanitation that is theirs as a human right.”
Almost four years after the world met the global target set in the MDGs for safe drinking water, and after the UN General Assembly declared that water was a human right, over three-quarters of a billion people, most of them poor, still do not have this basic necessity, Unicef said in a press release on the occasion of the World Water Day.
The MDG target for drinking water was met and passed in 2010 when 89% of the global population had access to improved sources of drinking water such as piped supplies, boreholes fitted with pumps, and protected wells.
Also in 2010, the UN General Assembly recognised safe drinking water and sanitation as a human right meaning.
“We must target the marginalised and often forgotten groups: those who are the most difficult to reach, the poorest and the most disadvantaged,” Wijesekera said. – Resource Spring
