Contamination, Pollution and Quality

Drop by drop ACCESS & HUL in Base of Pyramid Partnership for Safe Drinking Water for Rural Poor:

Yakalakshmi lives in Nekkunda village, Telengana region in Andhra Pradesh with her husband and two children. Though she has water piped to her house by the village panchayat, her entire family fell ill for a month last monsoon season by drinking water directly from the tap. "We all got high fever and severe diarrhea", she says, "we had to spend around Rs. 4000 on health care, which was very difficult for us". So when she got the opportunity this January to buy an effective water purifier through her Self Help Group (SHG) on an installment basis she was one of the first to sign up. Yakalakshmi is just one of the beneficiaries of a unique tie-up between ACCESS Development Services, a microfinance technical services non-profit organization, and Hindustan Unilever Limited, one of the country's largest producers of fast-moving consumer goods, to provide safe drinking water to rural poor. "Most of these villages have piped water or boreholes", says Padma, Project Coordinator at a local NGO, PEACE, "the problem is that tests by UNICEF in this district show that up to 70 percent of these sources are contaminated."The contamination gets even worse during the rainy season, especially due to poor sanitation and waste-management practices.

The most popular FAQs are listed below. Please click on a topic to view more detailed information:

Most drinking water projects are designed for supply of treated water through pipes to communities ; this requires investment on infrastructure such as pumps, overhead tanks, supply pipes, water purification equipment and after the project, maintenance staff and funds; while all this calls for planning, funding and time to execute, yet we cannot be certain that the water delivered remains uncon

Bottled water as daily drinking water Thirty five years after Bisleri launched India's first bottled water, urban India is filled with numerous bottled water brands, some known, and some unknown. There are more then 250 brands and 2000 plus bottling plants across the country. The market for packaged drinking water is around Rs 10 billion and is growing at the rate of 40 percent per annum.

There is a spurt of gastro-enteritis in the city today. Residents think that it is the contaminated mains supply from the BWSSB that is the source of the gastroenteritis. The Bangalore water supply and Sewerage Board thinks it is water bought by residents from the private water tankers that is the cause but then seems to change its mind.

Two simple technologies for water purity:

A majority of the population in the developing world still does not have access t

www.allaboutwater.org is an interesting site for laypersons but also to an extent for water resources researchers, covering a wide range of facts relating water vis-à-vis our planet and the human race and presenting its information in a clear, user-friendly way.