Cell phone ring tones are now music to the ears of the 35 million Bangladeshis at risk for numerous cancers and debilitating impairments from groundwater tainted with arsenic. Since the 1970's, wells for drinking water have been used to avoid pathogen contaminated surface water, but in the mid-90's many of the wells were found to have toxic levels of naturally occurring arsenic. "Tube wells" are currently the best method to deliver cheap and pathogen-free water in rural Bangladesh, but most wells are installed without prior knowledge about the arsenic concentrations in the area. This haphazard practice is about to change.
Lex van Geen and his colleagues at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University are working to reduce the exposure to arsenic through their development of an SMS - accessible database to best inform communities of how deep to drill their wells to avoid arsenic. A pilot project incorporated data from 300,000 wells into the Welltracker database, which reports for each village the number of wells tested, the proportion of unsafe wells and, when available, the start depth together with an estimate of the probability that the estimate is correct.
To access the database, a user sends a series of short messages to pinpoint their location based on either village name or geographic coordinates. Using data from previously drilled wells in the vicinity, the database calculates the safe start depth for the well at which arsenic concentrations are not likely to be toxic. The database also reports the probability of finding arsenic-free water at a certain depth. Dr. van Geen and colleagues are considering a money-back guarantee scheme that would use the probability estimates to set an insurance premium that a household could buy to eliminate the financial impact of failure after drilling a new well.
Trained users, like NGO workers, can upload information on newly drilled wells to the database via cell phone. New wells are tested with a field-kit to determine the arsenic concentration of the water, and the database is updated immediately, increasing the accuracy of the appropriate well depth for other users.
Pinpointing the safest depth to drill the well also saves money. As wells costs about $3 a meter to drill, excessively deep wells can put an undue financial burden on the user. If the well is too shallow, there is a greater chance that it will have unsafe concentrations of arsenic and will be of limited usefulness. In a country where most of the population earns under $1 a day, drilling a shallow yet safe well is of the utmost importance.
With 100-150 wells installed by trained NGO staff in Araihazar, the Welltracker database is now ready to be opened up for use across the country. An additional 5 million of the 8.6 million wells in the country are to be incorporated into the database from the Bangladesh Arsenic Mitigation and Water Supply Program, a program sponsored by UNICEF and the World Bank.
Bangladesh once had one of the lowest distributions of telephone access in the world. That was before Grameen Phone, part of the micro-finance juggernaut, Grameen Bank. The Village Phone program provides microloans, mostly to women, who are given handsets, and aims to connect 30,000 villages in rural Bangladesh. With almost 10 million other phone customers, the infrastructure has been laid out to help locate safe water throughout the country.
As cell phone ubiquity increases, it is only natural that they are leveraged for humanitarian and development purposes. While the Bangladeshi water footprint is small, Welltracker seems to be the shoe that fits to ensure a clean water supply.
A short video describing the drilling technique and the Welltracker database is available here.
(Thanks, Andrew!)
