Home ›› 15 May 2023 ›› Editorial
The availability of safe drinking water, particularly in Bangladesh’s hard to reach areas, is expected to worsen as the country experiences the effects of climate change, experts say. According to a study by the World Bank’s water and sanitation programme said, about 28 million Bangladeshis are living in harsh conditions in the hard-to-reach areas that make up a quarter of the country’s landmass.
The study found that char land that emerges from riverbeds as a result of the deposit of sediments is among the most inaccessible, along with hilly areas, coastal regions and haors bowl-shaped wetland areas in north-east Bangladesh. People living in hard-to-reach areas are often vulnerable to natural calamities like flooding, riverbank erosion and siltation, a water and sanitation specialist at the World Bank.
As a result of climate change, salinity in Bangladesh’s coastal areas has increased, causing a lack of sweet water. Women in coastal and haor areas need to go miles to collect a pitcher of safe drinking water. Bangladesh has made a significant progress in universal access to improved water sources, with more than 97 per cent of the population having had access in 2013. But access to safe drinking water is still low at 34.6. Between 2000 and 2012, the proportion of the population drinking arsenic-affected water dropped from 26.6 per cent to 12.4 per cent. Yet, Bangladesh is still the country with the largest proportion of people exposed to arsenic contamination in the world. More than 1.8 million people in Bangladesh lack access to an improved water source and 36 million lack improved sanitation.
Now more than ever access to safe water is critical to the health of families in Bangladesh. Bangladesh is a global leader when it comes to microfinance and is known as the birthplace of this innovative financial model. Since the 1970s, vibrant and sustained growth in the microfinance sector has resulted in enormous impact on financial inclusion of those living in poverty, particularly women. Bangladesh’s high need for water and sanitation improvements, along with its healthy microfinance sector and government support, makes it an ideal market for water.org’s financial solutions to the water crisis.
We seek to expand impact with our current partners and create new partnerships with additional microfinance institutions and commercial banks. Commercial banks are critical to our expansion strategy as they can offer low-interest loan products to a broad audience of people in need. Bangladesh will also partner with financial institutions to explore offering loans for water and sanitation through digital financial services so that customers can access and repay loans using their mobile phones. Water.org has strong partnerships with sector stakeholders in Bangladesh, such as the World Bank and Palli-Karma Sahayak Foundation. Such partnership is critical to driving policies that free capital for water and sanitation lending and encourage the uptake of financial solutions to help end the water crisis. Bangladesh is looking forward to recharging its aquifers with storm water, reclaimed water, desalinated water and potable water, in an effort to ward off the depletion of this precious resource.
Bangladesh ranks sixth in the world for countries with the largest estimated annual groundwater extraction, according to the UN World Water Development Report 2022. By 2030, groundwater levels in the greater Dhaka area may drop by between 3 and 5.1 metres per year, approximately 70 per cent faster than the current rate according to a study by the Bangladesh Water Partnership and supported by the 2030 Water Resource Group.
There are vast stores of fresh water held in a permeable rock layer underground, and are usually recharged by surface water seeping into the ground. In cases where the rate at which water is extracted from the aquifer exceeds the rate of recharge, managed aquifer recharge can inject water from other sources that typically would not reach the permeable rock. This includes storm water, reclaimed water, desalinated water and drinking water, allowing a subsequent recovery or environmental benefits for Bangladesh, a South Asian country bordered largely by India that is the most impoverished and most densely populated countries in the world Bangladesh, which has a population of 161 million in an area slightly smaller than the US state of Iowa.
Bangladesh’s economy relies heavily on agriculture as 63.2 per cent of the country’s population works in industries and agriculture. Even with an unemployment rate of less than 4 per cent, the poverty rate is 21.8 per cent. The dense population, small area, reliance on agriculture and poverty rate cumulatively create a crucial need for clean water. Humanitarian organisations aim at improving the water quality in Bangladesh. Water quality in Bangladesh has been a long-term struggle.
Since the country’s independence in 1971, international aid agencies have helped Bangladesh with its water crisis. At the time, a quarter of a million Bangladeshi children were dying each year from bacteria-contaminated surface water.Bangladesh relies on groundwater. Because of contaminated surface waters in the region, 90 per cent of the population relies on groundwater. Groundwater is the water that lies below the earth’s surface between soil pore spaces and fractures of rock formations. This water source is accessible through tube wells in the region. UNICEF and the World Bank attempted at improving access to water in Bangladesh.
To combat the poor-quality surface drinking water and provide more water for agriculture, these organisations funded the installation of about four million tube wells between 1960 and 1970. The tube wells created access to groundwater throughout the entire country.
Unfortunately, this led to mass poisoning because of contaminated groundwater. The largest mass poisoning in history occurred in Bangladesh. In the 1990s, arsenic was detected in the well water. The wells dug in the 1960s and 1970s were not tested for metal impurities, impacting an estimated 30-35 million people in Bangladesh. Ailments from exposure to arsenic include gastrointestinal diseases, physical deformities, cancer, nerve and circulatory system damage and death. About 1.12 million of the four million wells in Bangladesh are still contaminated with arsenic. Poor water quality significantly impacts public health. Arsenic poisoning is now the cause of death for one out of five people in Bangladesh.
However, officials used poor testing kits to examine the wells, leading to incorrectly marked wells. Unfortunately, many green-marked wells hold contaminated water that the public still uses. Additionally, the wells that were marked red were never properly closed off and can still be used today. Poverty plays a role in access to clean water. Both the wealthy and the impoverished in Bangladesh struggle greatly with poor water quality. The population living below the poverty line struggles three times more from water-related diseases and illnesses. Roughly two million people in poverty still lack access to improved water sources. The availability of safe drinking water, particularly in Bangladesh’s hard-to-reach areas, is expected to worsen as the country experiences the effects of climate change, experts say. According to a study by the World Bank’s water and sanitation programme, about 28 million Bangladeshis, or just more than 20 per cent of the population, are living in harsh conditions in the hard-to-reach areas that make up a quarter of the country’s landmass.
The study found that char land that emerges from riverbeds as a result of the deposit of sediments is among the most inaccessible, along with hilly areas, coastal regions and haors bowl-shaped wetland areas in north-east Bangladesh. People living in hard-to-reach areas are often vulnerable to natural calamities such as flooding, riverbank erosion and siltation. As a result of climate change, salinity in Bangladesh’s coastal areas has increased, causing a lack of sweet water. Women in coastal and haor areas need to go miles to collect a pitcher of safe drinking water.
Worsening weather extremes that bring floods, storm surges and cyclones are contributing to increases in water salinity and other problems such as accessing clean water in a hard-to-reach area about 50km from the capital Dhaka. River bank erosion has turned many people in this area into refugees. Since this area is very close to the Bay of Bengal, the amount of arsenic in the groundwater is also very high. We need to dig much deeper to get arsenic-free water. Experts expect the struggle to find drinkable water to intensify during the summer. In the drought-prone Barind Tract area in north Bangladesh, people need to dig more than 350 metres to get safe drinking water.
The situation is expected to worsen because an unusually low rainfall in the area means underground aquifers are not being replenished. Even in Dhaka, people have reported dwindling water supplies. Dhaka’s underground aquifers are usually recharged with water that percolates underground in nearby districts, but the levels of underground fresh water in those districts have also dropped, allowing seawater to start seeping into the aquifers. If this continues, experts say, Dhaka’s drinking water could become increasingly undrinkable. A recent study shows that the quality of water in many parts of Bangladesh has deteriorated, leaving a significant part of the population at potential threat of water pollution.
The writer is a researcher based in the UK
