In a rare cross border study, scientists from India and Pakistan have discovered that the flood plains of the Ravi river (which extend on both sides of the border) have high arsenic content. Nearly a quarter of the 30,567 wells and hand pumps tested across the region showed levels of arsenic that are above the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended levels of 10 microgram per litre.
The Indian side of the research was conducted by The Energy Research Institute (TERI) School of Advanced studies, while the researchers from Pakistan were from Quaid i Azam University, Islamabad. Chander Kumar Singh, the researcher from India, said that he had heard from Abida Farooqi, a fellow scientist in Islamabad about the arsenic levels along the Ravi, and it struck them that the problem could be similar, this side of the border, too. So they decided to do a collaborative study. “This is not a man made pollution issue, the soil is naturally high in arsenic content,” Singh said. “We've zeroed it down to the sub surface rocks that were deposited in this region around 20,000 years ago.”
The study found that not all wells were high in arsenic. In fact, some wells, barely 100 mts apart, showed varied concentrations. The variations could be the depth at which these wells were struck, and the sub surface rock at that particular depth. “The highly heterogeneous distribution of arsenic within a village could mean that predicting the status of an individual well without additional information is difficult. Every well, therefore, needs to be tested,'' the study says.
The researchers recommend that the contaminated wells should be labelled and that users be encouraged to obtain water from a cleaner well. However, since this is not always practical, they recommend that the authorities should have common reverse osmosis plants in these villages. Arsenic contamination is a recently discovered public health problem that was flagged initially in the 1980's when skin lesions among a population in were attributed to arsenicosis. Himalayan rivers are particularly high in arsenic content. The problem is severe in Bangladesh, West Bengal, Bihar and Nepal.
Studies on the effect of arsenic contamination have shown to reduce intellectual function in children and considerably limit adult earnings. In the subcontinent, groundwater is considered a cleaner source than surface water, which has higher microbial content, and is traditionally not boiled or treated in other way before consumption. But new aspects of ground water contamination are worrying, “Interestingly, we found that the arsenic contamination was only along the floodplains of the Ravi, and not the other rivers of the Indus system, like the Jhelum or Chenab. We are still investigating reasons for this,'' said Singh.
While the research is important from the aspect of science, it is even more important politically because there are few collaborative projects of such nature between India and Pakistan. There is always the security angle involved, even in simple studies. “We were lucky, because this research was conducted with funding aid from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under the aegis of the PEER Science Award. Even so, one has to be careful of the security implications,” said Singh. Indeed, even giving out the location of wells in each other's countries could have security implications. “This is why, we have given our data in the form of pie charts.''
