While residents of coastal areas in Khulna live in a region surrounded by water, they are assured of a good water supply only during the rainy season.
Frequent natural disasters, such as cyclones, and rise in sea levels have ensured a profusion of saline water, removing these people from potable water sources.
The burden is borne mostly by women in coastal areas, who have to trek several kilometres to fetch fresh water.
The freshwater crisis is most severe in the remote villages of Dacope and Koyra in Khulna, which is on the west coast of Bangladesh, and in Shyamnagar and Assasuni upazilas of Satkhira district.
Women, men and children walk across areas full of saline water, with pitchers, buckets, drums, jugs and whatever else they can carry, to bring back some drinking water.
Aleya Begum, resident of Sutarkhali village in Dacope upazila, is one such woman who says it takes her three hours to bring home two pitchers of water.
Sutarkhali, where Aleya lives, was badly damaged in the 2009 Aila cyclone, and the area was submerged for about five years — contaminating all drinking water sources — until embankments were built.
It is well known that scarcity of drinking water is acute as freshwater aquifers are not available at suitable depths and the surface water is highly saline in southwest Bangladesh.
Households are mainly dependent on a few water technologies and sources including Rain Water Harvesting (RWH), Pond Sand Filters (PSF), Reverse Osmosis (RO), and deep tube-wells and pond water for drinking purposes. But the technologies are expensive and barely affordable for the poor communities. Thus, they drink poisoned water from local sources.
In its 2019 report titled “Finding fresh water in a changing climate,” a water committee—made up of local civil society members working on the water crisis and led by a non-profit organization—said extracting freshwater becomes very difficult due to the presence of silt in the numerous underground water sources in the southwest coast of Bangladesh.
The committee observed that the depth of deep tube wells in the south-western coastal areas ranges between 700ft to 1,200ft. Tests have shown the water in these tube wells is comparatively less saline and arsenic-free. However, due to excess silt, the presence of rocks and high salinity, it is not possible to install deep tube wells in all coastal areas.
Akmal Hossain, executive engineer, Department of Public Health Engineering, Khulna, said that emphasis was being given to the use of surface water to solve the present water crisis and steps were being taken to make safe water accessible to every family in the coastal region.
“Forty ponds are being dug as part of this program and 5,000 reservoirs are being set up to store rain water. Besides, deep and shallow tube wells are being set in areas based on necessity,” he added.
