From Ranvijay Kumar, Nidan, Patna
Posted 21 October 2010
I work with a Patna-based NGO called Nidan on Urban Water and Sanitation issues. We operate in 10 slums in Patna. According to the Census of 2001, the population of Patna Urban Agglomeration Area (PUAA), spread over nearly 135.79 sq. km., amounts to approximately 16.97 lakh people, of which 63.5 per cent resides in slums. Nearly 46 per cent of land occupied by slums belongs to the government. The civic services provided to them are very poor; housing is congested, there is little or no drainage and a lack of public lavatories, forcing them to defecate in the open. They have little access to government health services and depend on private practitioners. More than half of these slums depend on the piped water supply of the Municipal Corporation and the rest use groundwater (tube wells, handpumps and dug wells).Read More
Delivery of safe drinking water is vital for protecting public health and of promoting more secure livelihoods.
This presentation deals with the problem of arsenic contaminated aquifers in the Gangetic belt of Bihar and the failure of the state government in tackling the crisis and calls for the establishment of a centralized knowledge & research hub with an understanding of the regional peculiarities to mitigate the crisis.
