Roksana Khatun moves aside dirt and floating leaves from a pond, slowly lowers her earthen pitcher into it and fills it with around 20 litres of water.
Collecting the water, she carefully climbs the muddy, steep stairs of the pond and walks around 45 minutes to return home. She holds the heavy pitcher against her waist or on her head the entire time.
Only to fetch water for her family, she does this arduous task every day, twice, throughout the year, except for a few months when it rains and she can store some drinking water, she told The Daily Star, while on her way home from the pond recently.
“I’ve a tubewell, but it does not work. I’ve no other option … I need water for my family of six. I’ve been doing this for years,” Roksana, aged over 50, said, wiping sweat off her face with her left hand.
Despite all these hard work, Roksana’s family, which lives in Madarbaria village of Khulna’s Koyra upazila, gets to drink saline water. Their consolation is the water of the pond is a bit less saline than what many others get.
A recent UNDP survey has highlighted the plight of the country’s coastal people regarding safe drinking water. It said 73 percent of the people living in five coastal upazilas — Koyra, Dacope, Paikgachha of Khulna and Assasuni and Shyamnagar of Satkhira — have to drink unsafe saline water.
Though the permissible salinity level in drinking water is 1,000mg per litre, those people, on average, consume water with salinity level between 1,427mg and 2,406mg per litre, reveals the survey.
In the dry season or winter, the salinity level of tubewell water in Shyamnagar goes up to 6,600mg per litre, more than six times the permissible limit.
The survey was carried out on 66,234 households of 271,464 people living in 39 unions of the five coastal upazilas, under a project, titled “Gender-responsive Coastal Adaptation (GCA)”.
The study, which ended in February, also found that 63 percent of the people face difficulties even in getting that water as they have no other source of drinking water.
In 74 percent households surveyed, women are solely responsible for collecting the drinking water while in 10 percent households males take on the responsibility. The task is shared by the male and female members of the families in rest of the households.
Many spend more than two hours daily to collect drinking water. Sometimes, they need to go more than a kilometre to fetch the water, either from a tubewell or a pond.
People in more than 16 percent households surveyed said they have to walk even more.
The study also found that among the people’s available drinking water sources, the salinity level of 52 percent ponds was higher than the salinity level of ponds elsewhere in the country. It was the same for 77 percent tubewells in the coastal region.
On average, the salinity level of tubewell water is 2,406mg in Dacope, 1,453mg in Koyra, 1,510mg in Paikgachha, 998mg in Assasuni and 1,683mg in Shyamnagar.
For ponds, it is on average 650mg in Dacope, 1,024mg in Koyra, 1,581mg in Paikgachha, 1,203mg in Assasuni and 1,184mg in Shyamnagar.
Also people living there have to spend more than those in the capital for drinking water, the survey revealed.
Shahidul Islam, the director of NGO Uttaran and a native of Sathkhira, said, “As you travel around the villages in most of the upazilas of the district, you will see there are many deep-tube wells that have been set up to ensure drinking water for the villagers, but they simply don’t work.”
2021 / thedailystar.net