Salinity getting worse in coastal areas

A recent survey, titled "Gender-responsive Coastal Adaptation" and carried out by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), has brought to light the hardships faced by people of the coastal areas. According to the survey, 73 percent of the people living in five coastal upazilas of Satkhira have to drink saline water on a daily basis. Among these people, another 63 percent face difficulties even in getting this brackish form of water due to not having access to any other source of drinking water.

UNDP has run the survey on a total of 66,234 households comprising of 271,464 people, and found that the salinity levels of 52 percent of the ponds and 77 percent of tube-wells in the coastal regions were higher than the ponds and tube-wells situated in any other parts of the country. Although the permissible salinity level in drinking water is 1000mg per litre, on average, people of the coastal areas consume water with a salinity level between 1,427mg and 2,406 mg per litre, which has serious health effects. The situation gets even worse during the dry season, when the salinity level of tube-well water in some parts of Satkhira goes up to 6,600mg per litre.

A report published by The Daily Star on March 22, 2021 shows that in coastal areas, most people spend more than two hours per day in fetching water, as they have to commute more than a kilometre for this purpose. The UNDP survey has converted this time into monetary value on the basis of the government-run programme "Kajer Binimoye Khaddo (Food for Work)" and discovered that people of the coastal regions are losing around Tk 2,463 on a monthly basis due to spending productive hours in collecting drinking water.

Experts have given important suggestions to solve the problem. Rainwater harvesting, for instance, can ensure supply of safe drinking water during dry seasons. Also, the destruction of coastal ponds by saltwater shrimp farming has to be prevented. Another way of mitigating the problem is by setting up water desalination plants, where water collected from the Bay of Bengal or salinated rivers will be stored in giant tanks and later purified, although the environmental costs of such an enterprise must be taken into consideration as well. The government must sit with the experts and find sustainable solutions to this serious situation and alleviate the sufferings of the people in these areas.