High rainfall, low water table

Women in a Chittagong slum queue for water.

Credit: WaterAid / Juthika Howlader

Md. Firoj Alam reports on the problem of ground water depletion in Bangladesh - and the possible solution.

From December to May, the dwellers of Shreepure village, Jamalpure district, do not get much water from their hand-dug tube-wells.

As soon as the deep tube-wells start taking ground water for agriculture, the water table goes down, causing drinking water scarcity.

It happens almost every year. The situation is similar in the drought-prone Barind-track zone in the north of the country. The ground water based agriculture system is causing desertification and scarcity of safe drinking water.

In the south west, Satkhira, Bagerhat and Khulna have the worst water crisis in the country. To fetch a pitcher of safe water, the women and adolescent girls have to trek mile after mile for water that may not even be safe. The safe water sources in this area have been depleted because of the saline water intrusion from shrimp cultivation. Read more about this problem here.

In the Chittagong Hill Tracts [CHT] area, springs and streams, the main sources of water, are drying up rapidly. Now many of the villagers, mostly tribal people, are considering abandoning their age-old settlements because of water scarcity.

In the major towns and cities, large numbers of the population are not getting piped water because of production shortages. For example, the Chittagong WASA has the capacity to produce only 30 per cent of the total demand, while Dhaka WASA is barely meeting 75 per cent of demand. One of the major reasons for the water shortage in the cities and towns is the unavailability of the ground water, the main source.

A further problem is that the ground water in all but three of Bangladesh's 64 districts is arsenic contaminated.

In brief, this is our national water scenario. Unfortunately, it is getting worse day by day.

Why? The main cause is the unplanned use of water. Bangladesh lacks an integrated water resource management plan for this most precious of resources. Day by day, citizens are becoming increasingly dependent on ground water for agriculture and household use.

Yet this dependency on ground water can be easily reduced by creating watersheds throughout the country. Bangladesh is one of the wettest countries in the world, with precipitation of 206 cm per year. Rainfall is not lacking. Therefore, the country has the opportunity to preserve rainwater in artificial and natural reservoirs to use during the dry season.

In the Philippines there are watershed projects in almost every village, supported by the government's 'Community Based Integrated Watershed Management' programme.

India, meanwhile, has set perhaps the best example of judicious use of water resources. Thousands of villages across India are now under "watershed" scheme. The provincial government of Maharastra has made a law obliging citizens to harvest rain water, helping to raise the water table.

The drudgery of women and children in the south west zone knows no bounds due to the scarcity of sweet water. The age-old tradition of farming rice and other food crops are on the verge of extinction. The natural vegetation, flora and fauna are all at risk. Without initiation of integrated water resource management, the possibility of recovering normal lives and livelihoods in this area seems remote.

Ironically, while the ground water table is dropping at an alarming rate (3.3 metres a year in Dhaka), the roads and lanes get flooded with rain water. This rain water can easily be harvested to use for toilet flushing, washing and bathing at the very least.

Richer people currently use drinking quality water for toilet flushing and car washing. By making it law, the government can make it compulsory for city dwellers to harvest rain water and use it for these purposes.

The lives, economy and culture of the people of Bangladesh are deeply attached to water. But we have been misusing it in a variety of ways.

To save the water sources, integrated water resource management is urgently required. Unfortunately, this is still missing in the water sector.

Md. Firoj Alam is working on Water Safety Plan and Water Resource Management with WaterAid in Bangladesh.

This is an edited version of the story first published in The Daily Star.
The full version can be read here.