Aleya Begum, a 25-year-old woman, lives in Sutarkhali Union of Dacope Upzazila, Khulna. Waking up before dawn every day, Aleya Begum walks to a water plant near Sutarkhali Union Parishad, five kilometres away from her home, to collect fresh drinking water for her 6-member family. It will be midday or even later before she returns home from the plant where pond water is treated.
As there is no other means of transport to go there, she has to walk the 5-kilometre uneven path to the plant, the only source of safe water for cooking and drinking in the area.
After the two-hours walk, Aleya has to queue up for a long period to get her turn at the water point. Not only for her, this is the daily routine for thousands of people of Sutarkhali and many other unions in the coastal districts including Khulna, Satkhira and Bagerhat in the southwest Bangladesh.
The scarcity of drinking water is acute as freshwater aquifers are not available at suitable depths, and surface water is highly saline in southwest Bangladesh.
Households are mainly dependent on some of the limited water technologies including Rain Water Harvesting (RWH), Pond Sand Filters (PSF), Reverse Osmosis (RO) and deep tube-wells, as well as pond water for drinking purposes. Except pond water, all the listed technologies are expensive and not affordable by the poor communities. They have no alternative other than to drink contaminated water from local sources.
As a result, people in these areas often suffer from waterborne diseases. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that four out of five cases of child mortality in these areas are related to contaminated drinking water.
The lack of access to clean water leads to increased incidence rate of diseases, lower attendance rates at schools and work, and a drastic reduction in overall quality of life. According to a 2012 government study by Department of Public Health Engineering (DPHE), 61 per cent of the coastal region's population faces serious health issues.
Women and young girls are amongst the worst sufferers of water scarcity. As coastal women drink less water, high blood pressure, heart diseases and kidney diseases are common among them which affect the health of new-born babies.
In addition to that, most people in the region are unaware of the increasing salinity and its many implications. According to a new study carried by the DPHE and the Institute of Water Modelling, 84 per cent of people don't know about salinity in groundwater in the country's coastal region.
When cyclone Aila hit the region in 2009, almost all its the freshwater sources were destroyed. The situation has not improved much even after 10 years of the disaster. In most places, tube-wells don't work because of salinity in the shallow and deep aquifer levels.
The embankments are eroded and groundwater sources are flooded forcing about 70 per cent of the people in the region to depend on pond water for drinking and domestic uses.
Over the past 25 years, salinity intrusion in Bangladesh has increased by about 26 per cent with the affected area expanding each year.
According to a study by the World Bank, climate change is likely to further increase river and groundwater salinity dramatically by 2050 and to exacerbate shortages of drinking water and irrigation in the southwest coastal areas of the country. It will adversely affect the livelihoods of at least 2.9 million poor people in a region where 2.5 million people are already struggling due to the lack of safe drinking water (River salinity and climate change: evidence from coastal Bangladesh, World Bank, 2014).
As water sources dry up and its demand increases, women like Aleya Begum are forced to walk further and further to collect water for their family.
Despite the passage of 10 years after Cyclone Aila, the government and the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are yet to restore freshwater sources in the country's coastal belt.
This is primarily because of lack of water flow in rivers which contributes to the rise of salinity. The water plants, which are built by different authorities, become inoperative within a short time due to extreme level of salinity and lack of regular maintenance.
Recently, Nobo Jatra, a USAID-funded project, conducted a study on availability and the options for surface and ground water in Khulna and Satkhira districts. The study found that a single option or technology could not be recommended for providing safe water to salinity-prone areas.
Depending on the local situation, an appropriate technology should be used to ensure supply of safe drinking water. Exploring tube-well technology should be the first priority if suitable aquifer is available; otherwise, surface water or treatment technologies can be utilised.
The study shows that deep tube-well is the most preferable option where suitable deep aquifer with low-salinity water is available. But suitable ground water is absent in most of the places. Pond Sand Filter (PSF) is a more effective option for community water supply where suitable pond is available.
But maintenance and management are issues where mass mobilisation is a prerequisite. For existing PSF, pond re-excavation, cleaning, lime-mixing on each edge to resist saline water intrusion are needed. Though it is seasonal and expensive for the poor and extreme poor households, Rain Water Harvesting (RWH) system appears to be a suitable option at household and community-level.
The government has taken various steps to solve water problems in the coastal region. Dredging of Gorai River is one of them. Had the project (Phase-I undertaken in 1996 and Phase-II in 2009) been completed successfully, this would have increased the flow of river water in the coastal region, thereby cutting salinity problems'. Thus freshwater sources would also have been restored, and eventually the salinity problem would have been solved.
Along with these, a combination of household and community-based options can be suitable for ensuring round-the-year water supply. Community-based options need regular maintenance. In addition to installation of water supply facilities, it is necessary to make the community people aware of proper operation and maintenance of the facilities.
Southwest region is surrounded by a number of rivers and water is abundant. But due to extreme level of salinity and absence of long-term sustainable solutions, the people in coastal belt are suffering from scarcity of potable water. Their sufferings may remind one Samuel Taylor Coleridge's verse from The Rime of Ancient Mariner: 'Water, water everywhere,/ Nor any drop to drink'.
The writer is Technical Program Director - Nobo Jatra at World Vision Bangladesh.
