Safe drinking water for West Bengal

With some groundwater in India being contaminated with arsenic, fluoride or salt, around 27 million people are at risk of arsenic or fluoride poisoning. This can cause a range of health issues, including cancer and bone diseases, and the issue is particularly serious in the state of West Bengal.

The ADB is working with the Indian government to provide safe and sustainable drinking water to 1.65 million people in West Bengal. The Bank has explored several ways to do this; one shortlisted solution falls under the Nature-Based Solutions approach, with the aim to improve the storage of floodwater using inactive river channels along the Rupnarayan River. Some channels carry water only during the monsoon season, so during the dry season they could provide a suitable water storage solution.

However, the ADB and its partners have no comprehensive overview of the availability of potential water storage sites in the target area. The EO Clinic recently stepped in to provide such an inventory of suitable sites.

The inventory is being built by ESA EO Clinic service providers Everis (Spain), IHCantabria (Spain) and i-Sea (France) by combining maps of surface water bodies and their dynamics – including the seasonal changes in their extent – with the latest information on land use and land cover for the surroundings of the identified seasonal water areas.

This image shows variations in the extent of the course of the Rupnarayan River in a section of West Bengal, as seen in Copernicus Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar acquisitions.