Geogenic Contamination

India is running out of water fast. As if this is not bad news enough, it has been found that even the available water is highly polluted with organic and hazardous pollutants.

As the Ganga emerges from the glaciers and glides along the foothills of the mighty Himalayas through the towns and cities with their sprawling ghats, engineered embankments, hydroelectric dams, and interrupted flows at barrages, the icy chilliness of its waters is lost.

Estimates suggest that about 10 million Indians are affected by fluorosis, a sickness associated with the consumption of increased concentrations of fluoride, mostly through water. Bones get weakened due to excessive accumulation of fluoride in them which results in increased hip and wrist fractures. Dental enamel gets eroded.

Basubai is a mother of three young children—Ajay (9), Manju (11) and Sonu (13). She is married to Mukesh Singh in Jamniamota village in Bakaner block in Dhar district, Madhya Pradesh.

Up until two decades ago, the main sources of drinking water in Rajasthan included surface water from perennial ponds, reservoirs, lakes, dams, rivers and streams with borewells and tubewells used sparingly and only in remote areas. All this changed when guinea worm infections started appearing in the state. 

Farhanuddin was just five years old when a pain in his knee began bothering him. It was 2013. Slowly, his legs began to change shape. They got so badly deformed that it began to affect his everyday life. He was gloomy and tired most times and had trouble walking.

Fluorosis continues to be a regional issue in Telangana to this day, even decades after the first cases were discovered in Nalgonda in 1937. More than three lakh people in the district are affected with skeletal and dental fluorosis, a stigma that has stuck for generations.

In 2010, nine-year-old Kailash from Miyati village, Jhabua developed symptoms of skeletal fluorosis. Fluorosis, which affects millions of people in India, is a health issue caused due to high fluoride content in drinking water. Skeletal fluorosis is marked by deformed bones.

Rabindra Kumar Jena, the Member of Parliament (MP) from Balasore, Odisha knew that something was wrong with the health of people in a part of his constituency but he could not put his finger to it. By sheer chance, in 2015, he got to know that this seemed to be related to excessive fluoride in water, which caused a disease called skeletal fluorosis.

Delhi's groundwater most ‘over exploited’ after Punjab and Rajasthan