Around 20 million people in Bangladesh have no access to safe drinking water. The Bangladesh Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Project (BRWSSP) is a project which is supported by the World Bank, and which utilises a strong monitoring process and the participation of the community to provide safe water and hygienic sanitation to 1.2 million people in salinity prone coastal areas and arsenic hot spots.
The project installs deep tube wells and constructs piped water supply schemes in rural areas where there are water shortages due to shallow aquifers that are highly contaminated by salinity, arsenic, bacterial pathogens, iron and other pollutants.
The project provides safe water to villagers in 33 districts and 383 unions (the lowest tier of local government) that generally have low coverage for safe water supply and acute arsenic contamination, via both piped and non-piped water facilities.
Construction of 14,000 water points, primarily deep tube wells, is also being undertaken by BRWSSP, together with rain water harvesting units, pond sand filters, and arsenic iron removal plants, where it is not viable, either geographically or economically, to supply piped water.
What is great about this project are the community participatory processes that the project follows; the installation site, mitigation options, and maintenance of the schemes are all decided on by the communities, and cross-checked by the Department of Public Health Engineering (DPHE).
The BRWSSP has strengthened previous water-quality monitoring protocols; all water points are tested following installation and random quality checks are also carried out at around 10% of the installed water points within 3 months of the commissioning of new wells under the project.
The monitoring of water quality over a span of months ensures that both the reliability and consistency of water quality is maintained. Water is vital to life, and both fresh drinking water and hygienic sanitation is vital to health, so projects like this one are crucial in areas where there is still little or no access to potable drinking water and hygienic sanitation.
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