Over thousands of years, arsenic has been washing down from the Himalayas with the Ganga water as sediment. It remained within permissible limits and did no harm till around the 1970s. But due to deaths in the Gangetic belt caused mainly by the unhygienic pattern of water consumption and poor sanitary conditions, the government and UNICEF sank millions of tubewells. For a few years, the overall health of people no doubt improved. Unfortunately another problem set in. Indiscriminate pumping out of ground water, not only for domestic use but also for farming, saw the water table going down very fast. This in turn increased arsenic in the ground water. The result: Locals got exposed to high levels of arsenic. "In places where there is large scale withdrawal, ground water gets aerated and the arsenic compounds present in the water get degraded by the oxygen. Arsenic also has an affinity for iron, so arsenic-laced water will usually have a yellow tinge due to the presence of iron," Prof Dipankar Chakraborty, Director at the School of Environment Studies at Jadavpur University says after carrying out extensive work in the arsenic-affected parts of UP, Bihar and Bangladesh.
Man proposes, God disposes? What to do? Let the scientists find a solution to this unexpected disease and disorder in the belt.
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