The whodunit is crop irrigation plus brutal use of groundwater
Readers of the classical British crime mystery genre would be familiar with arsenic as the perfect poison or poison of choice because of its colourless, odourless and tasteless qualities, and its gradual, cumulative effect on the victim that made it difficult to detect without the investigative and deductive talents of private ‘consulting detectives’ such as Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. Now arsenic is making waves in Pakistan and abroad in a big way for entirely different reasons. A shocking new study published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances has 50 to 60 million Pakistanis using groundwater which contains arsenic concentrations up to 5-20 times higher than the level of 10 micrograms per litre considered dangerous to human health by the World Health Organisation. All along the Indus plain in eastern Pakistan, data collected from 1200 groundwater pumps revealed this chilling statistic (albeit not universally accepted at this stage), with densely populated cities including Lahore and Hyderabad figuring as hotspots.
Arsenic is present in underground rocks and sediments and as the water table levels recede lower, the magnitude of the semi-metallic element tends to increase correspondingly. The government’s much- publicized ‘Clean’ Drinking Water Filtration plants, which draw from deeper sites, and are widely used by city-dwellers, may thus possibly be purveying contaminated water in various degrees. In Pakistan, the problem is two- dimensional. The indiscriminate exploitation of groundwater by about 50 to 70 percent of the population in the absence of any government rules and regulations has pushed water levels to alarming depths, with the natural arsenic deposits leaching into it. Second, the use of groundwater for irrigation by literally flooding the flat Indus Valley plain to support and enhance crop yields ensures that arsenic re-enters the underground water aquifers. Arsenic poisoning, for which there is no care, causes irreversible damage to human health.
The government must tackle such doomsday scenarios by utilising modern scientific expertise, both domestic and foreign, also involving WHO. Finding groundwater depth without arsenic, providing cheap water filters to villages and instilling awareness are of the essence.
