By Editorial comment: Bangladesh’s water crisis demands immediate attention. Despite
progress in access to improved water sources, safe drinking water remains scarce.
Arsenic contamination affects millions, requiring comprehensive solutions. Microfinance
partnerships offer hope, but collaborative efforts are crucial. Climate change adds
complexity, increasing salinity and exacerbating access challenges. Addressing water
pollution from industrialization and improper sanitation is vital. Bangladesh’s resilience
is commendable, but collective action is the key to secure a sustainable water future for
all.
Clean water: A big challenge in Bangladesh
(source: Rayhan Ahmed Topader | Published: 00:00, Sep 15,2022 in NEW AGE )
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. In Bangladesh and around the world, millions are navigating the Covid-19
pandemic with the added challenge of living without access to safe water.
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. The Bangladesh
Water Development Board has finalised a draft national strategy for what it calls managed aquifer recharge
and submitted it to higher authorities for approval.
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. Bacteria and pathogens, such as E coli, cholera and typhoid, were causing
severe health problems for both children and adults. 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.
However, 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.
Riverbank 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. According to
Ainun Nishat, a climate change expert and vice-chancellor of BRAC University in Dhaka, rainfall across
Bangladesh has halved and become more unpredictable over the past five years. This has led to problems
including growing salinity in groundwater.
Salinity in the water of coastal areas has now reached over 20 parts per thousand, but the human body can
only tolerate five parts per thousand. The best option for drought- and saline-prone areas is to preserve
rainwater in artificial ponds and distribute it to communities. Most of experts agree that the government
must turn to technology to provide drinking water. Filtration and desalination plants are expensive, but
experts say that they offer the only chance to avert a looming crisis.
Even though four of South Asia’s largest rivers run through Bangladesh, the country struggles to provide
sufficient drinking water for its inhabitants, in large part because of pollution. 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 study looked at both conventional pollutants and emerging contaminants. The concentration of heavy
metals is higher in water bodies close to the industrial zones. These heavy metals concentrations in both
ground and surface water of Bangladesh often exceed the maximum permissible limit recommended by the
WHO for drinking water. The study also found faecal coliform present in water almost all over the country,
along with various pesticides and, more recently, emerging contaminants such as antibiotic residue,
fluorescence whitening agent and microplastics.
Before industries arrived, people had mostly used pond water for cooking and domestic use. For drinking
water, we used to rely on tube wells, but nowadays none of these sources work as pollution is very high and
the water level has dropped drastically.
The Bangladesh government at one point planned to supply purified water to Dhaka residents by treating the
water from surrounding rivers. The water from the Buriganga, Sitalakhya, the Turag and the Balu are
extremely polluted; and, they do not carry sufficient water in the dry season,
Now, the government plans to bring water from the Padma and the Meghna, which will involve additional
cost, effort and energy. Studies identified that the overgrowth of population, industrialisation, rapid
urbanisation, improper sanitation and the use of agrochemicals as being responsible for the deteriorated
quality of water in Bangladesh.
