MORE than 20 million people still face the problem of safe drinking water although the Awami League in its 2008 national elections manifesto, iterated in the 2014 manifesto, pledged safe drinking water for the entire population by 2011.
Yet salinity and arsenic contamination still remain major challenges for the government to meet seven years after the deadline.
The Department of Public Health Engineering seeks to claim that 87 per cent of the people have access to safe drinking water, considering the availability of water within 150 metres.
A public health engineering official is reported to be saying that a report in 2015 shows that 87 per cent of the people are under the safe water coverage, keeping to the Millennium Development Goals, but the same report in 2017 shows the coverage to benefit 56 per cent of the population as the Sustainable Development Goals has changed the definition of safe water.
WaterAid Bangladesh says that more than four million people are still out of the basic water coverage because of salinity, arsenic contamination and poor supply network.
Moreover, despite the government’s mitigation of arsenic contamination by a good measure, dropping from 23 per cent in 1993 to 12 per cent in 2014, salinity increased in a vast area that covers 19 districts.
The phenomenon, largely attributed to effects of climate change, forces a day-labourer who earns Tk 200 a day to spend Tk 20 on water every day.
A former DPHE chief engineer, referring to the multiple indicator cluster survey that the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics and UNICEF conduct, says that 1.90 million people living in 61 districts are still at risk of arsenic contamination.
A World Bank report in 2016 shows that 22 per cent of the tube wells of the country have arsenic contamination.
The ruling party’s election pledges about safe drinking water for all by 2011 have failed, as the government has not made much of efforts on the front, making them nothing but political rhetoric.