Polluted water is killing more people globally than all forms of violence, including war and terror. Half of the victims are children, a UN report has said. In India, over 1 lakh people die of water-borne diseases annually, reports Chetan Chauhan.
Polluted water is killing more people globally than all forms of violence, including war and terror. Half of the victims are children, a UN report has said. In India, over 1 lakh people die of water-borne diseases annually.
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Wastewater, a cocktail of fertiliser run-off and sewage disposal, will be one of the biggest dangers to environment with world population expected to double in 40 years, says the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report released on Monday, the World Water Day.
Countries such as India — with a capacity to treat just 30 per cent of the wastewater and child malnourishment rate of 46 per cent — will be most vulnerable.
Drinking water in one-third of India’s 600 districts has a high fluoride content, as a result 65 million people are suffering from fluorosis, which causes crippling problems, says a Planning Commission report. One-fourth of the districts have high salinity and nitrate content in water.
To top it, hospitals in the worst affected districts do not have a system of early detection of ill-effects of contaminated water. “By the time the disease is detected, it is too late for cure,” said a commission official, who didn’t wish to be identified.
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Things are changing, but slowly.
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Things are changing, but slowly.
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In February, Dalit village of Halsi in Bihar got its first toilet. A month earlier, all homes in a village in Orissa’s Koraput district had got toilets. “We used to defecate near the stream, the only source of water for the village. Many elders and children died each year due to water-borne diseases,” recalled Abudu Gangi, a villager.
Every year across the world, more than 3 million people die of water diseases, including 1.2 million children — one child every 20 seconds, estimates UNEP.
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.
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