The Bangladesh government must urge the United Nations and other agencies to investigate the environmental impact of India’s River Linking Plan before any funding is approved, writes Mostofa Sarwar
IN HIS children’s classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Dr Seuss describes a villain as ‘a sandwich with arsenic sauce.’ Not the fictional kind, but a real and deadly arsenic-laced drinking water, aptly dubbed ‘devil’s water’, is now a grim reality for over 39 million Bangladeshis, according to the World Health Organisation. Rather than playing detective to identify the Grinch, I aim to address this crisis through the lens of public health, contamination mechanisms, the impact of the Farakka Barrage and the looming consequences of Modi’s $168 billion River Linking project.
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We grasp the staggering scale of this catastrophe through the words of Harvard physicist Richard Wilson. After prime minister Vajpayee proposed the River Linking Plan in 2002, following president Azad’s speech and a Supreme Court recommendation, Wilson, a global authority on arsenic contamination, remarked: ‘Bangladesh makes the Chernobyl disaster look like a Sunday School picnic’. Consider that Chernobyl remains one of the most devastating disasters of the last century.
The arsenic crisis began surfacing in the mid-1980s when West Bengal physicians started seeing Bangladeshi patients with arsenic-related illnesses. In 1993, the Bangladesh government formed a committee to investigate. Decades later, the country faces the worst arsenic contamination disaster in recorded history. A 2012 WHO report found nearly 39 million people exposed to arsenic levels exceeding the safe threshold of 10 µg/L, with an estimated 43,000 deaths annually. Sixty-two districts — 97 per cent of the country — rely on aquifers tainted with arsenic.
Groundwater is the primary drinking source for rural Bangladesh. Arsenic exposure has led to widespread skin lesions and rising cancer rates. While cancer deaths remain relatively low, the latency period means numbers are climbing. The link between arsenic and cancers — particularly of the bladder, lungs and skin — is well documented in South America, China, and Japan.
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Beyond health, arsenic poisoning is tearing apart Bangladesh’s social fabric. Rural women with arsenicosis face divorce and social ostracism; daughters with visible lesions are deemed unmarriageable. These women, stigmatised and abandoned, sometimes take their own lives. Gustave Flaubert’s Emma Bovary drank arsenic in despair. In Bangladesh, innocent women are driven to suicide not by personal failings, but by poisoned water.
The likely source of arsenic lies in the erosion of arsenic-rich rocks, particularly alluvium, around the Gangotri Glacier, Mansarovar, Mt Kailash, and other Himalayan headwaters of the Ganges and Brahmaputra. This geological process began millions of years ago with the collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates. Bangladesh’s landmass, formed by deltaic deposits of this alluvium, contains arsenic-bearing pyrite (arsenopyrite and loellingite). These fine particles have a large surface area and remained stable beneath a high water table, until human intervention disrupted the balance.
When the water table drops, air fills the pores in soil and rock and oxygen reacts with pyrite, releasing arsenic. One dry season is enough to trigger this release. During the wet season, rainwater flushes the arsenic into groundwater. Thus, the contamination mechanism is twofold: oxidation due to falling water tables, followed by leaching into aquifers.
Let us distinguish natural from man-made causes. While seasonal droughts can lower the water table, a drop of 10 metres or more is unlikely without upstream water diversion and excessive groundwater extraction. Two major human interventions, India’s Farakka Barrage and widespread tube well installation by UN agencies in the 1970s, are responsible for this dramatic decline. Notably, arsenicosis cases were virtually nonexistent before the mid-1970s in both Bangladesh and West Bengal.
Now, India’s monumental River Linking Plan demands scrutiny. How much worse will Modi’s project make an already dire situation? To echo Professor Wilson: ‘Arsenic toxicity in Bangladesh due to India’s River Linking Project makes the arsenic damages caused by Farakka look like a Sunday School picnic.’
Modi’s plan, originally envisioned by prime minister Vajpayee, proposes linking nearly sixty rivers—including the Brahmaputra, Ganges, Teesta, Narmada, Tapti, Godavari, Krishna, Mahanadi and Kaberi. This would reshape India’s hydrology, with massive ecological consequences. The $168 billion initiative includes hundreds of reservoirs, over 15,000 kilometres of canals (50–100 meters wide), diversion of one-third of water from eastern rivers, irrigation of land twice the size of Bangladesh, and generation of 34,000 megawatts of hydroelectricity.
Diverting vast volumes of water during the dry season will reduce flow in 54 rivers entering Bangladesh. This will further depress the water table, already lowered by Farakka, triggering a cascade of arsenic release, disease and death.
The Bangladesh government must urge the United Nations and other agencies to investigate the environmental impact of India’s River Linking Plan before any funding is approved. Citizen brigades — comprising legal experts, technologists and activists from both Bangladesh and India — should mobilise. Many Indian political and environmental groups already oppose the project. These brigades can educate the public, especially in Bangladesh and West Bengal, about the looming catastrophe.
They must also warn corporations, banks, governments and stakeholders that mass lawsuits will be filed by expatriates on behalf of affected populations. Beyond legal action, Bangladesh must launch a global awareness campaign, engaging environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, Audubon Society, American Rivers, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and others. The world must be alerted to this impending eco-environmental disaster of unprecedented scale.
