It is unfortunate that, despite being a country overflowing with rivers, Bangladesh has historically lacked an adequate national program to monitor and ensure quality drinking water for its citizens.
Safe drinking water should be treated as a basic human right, and has even been declared as such by the United Nations, so it is nothing short of shameful how poorly we have treated our water resources and how the authorities concerned have been inadequate in offering their support to the people.
The lack of safe drinking water particularly aggravates the rural population of the country; 65% of the population lacks access to safe drinking water and 41% gets its water from sources with faecal contamination, according to government figures.
To that end, it is fantastic to see start-ups like Shishir Water take matters into their own hands to address the vast need for pure drinking water; using state-of-the-art water purifying technology, the initiative is currently providing clean potable water for people in contamination-affected areas of Bangladesh.
While such projects are good to see, and more such start-ups will only provide much-needed respite to our rural community, a concern of this magnitude should not be the responsibility of socially conscious entrepreneurs but rather the government and other authorities associated within the affected localities.
In recent times, we have spoken at length of all the economic strides the country has made, but when we continue to live in a country where the majority of its people do not have access to safe, clean drinking water, we really need to do better.
