Projects

Arsenic mitigation

From Nepal in the north to Vietnam in the south, high levels of naturally present arsenic in groundwater affect much of the water in East and Southeast Asia. Unlike many water problems like iron contamination, arsenic neither tastes nor looks like spoiled water. It typically derives from natural deposits in the earth’s crusts and requires a chemical—not biological—treatment. This natural deposit has slow but deadly human consequences, which include scaling and pigmentation of the skin, stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, numbness in hands and feet, partial paralysis, blindness and other fatalities. Arsenic has also been linked to cancer of the bladder, lungs, skin, kidney, nasal passages, liver, and prostate.

Many people consume arsenic contaminated water without realizing it and grow to accept their slow health deterioration. The World Health Organization (WHO) has therefore deemed it a global public health problem, affecting more than 130 million people in 70 countries. In the United States of America, the Environmental Protection Agency sets safe arsenic levels at no more than 10 parts per billion. In some communities the Tagore-Sengupta Foundation has worked, levels as high as 800 parts per billion have been detected. This is a human rights issue and requires an international response.

During the last ten years, Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA, Bengal Engineering and Science University in Bengal, India, and Water for People in Denver, Colorado have responded by installing 175 community-based wellhead arsenic removal units in remote villages in the state of West Bengal, India. Each unit serves nearly 200 households in each community with approximately 7,000 liters of treated water produced per day, supplying nearly 1,000 villagers with arsenic-safe water. Moreover, each unit can provide water without requiring electricity or external addition of chemicals. Many of these units have been running satisfactory for several years under the supervision of a villagers’ committee in each community.

The easy-to-operate unit provides arsenic-safe drinking water using re-generable arsenic adsorbents and can be started or stopped with no real time lag. When the filter is exhausted, the absorbent material is regenerated (unlike most filters, which are simply discarded) through a simple process consisting of a well-aerated, coarse sand filter at a central location, thereby decreasing the waste volume by “cleaning” the adsorbents of collected arsenic and catching the leftover arsenic-sludge in the filter. The cleaned absorbent material is then returned to the water unit, filtering water as if the unit were new. This disposal technique, developed and validated under rural conditions, is scientifically more appropriate than dumping arsenic-loaded adsorbents into landfills, which is the typical practice in developed nations.

The First in Cambodia

The Tagore-Sengupta Foundation in collaboration with Lehigh University and the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA) has organized two communities in Cambodia to use a central filtration system, the first successful community-based system not only in the country but also in all of Southeast Asia. Three additional sites are being identified for growth in the near future with the hopes of scaling the system to the neighboring countries of Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. T-S vice-president, William C. Brehm, will be moving to Cambodia in August 2010 to work for a local NGO, Caring for Cambodia, and will oversee the expansion of the arsenic filtration systems in the region.

Transforming a Crisis into an Opportunity

The lesson learned from arsenic mitigation projects in severely affected regions is the realization that in every crisis there is an opportunity for innovation and holistic growth. The use of shared, community based water filtration systems has spurred individual innovation while providing clean water to a large number of people.

In West Bengal, one community’s small tariff for filtered water has produced enough economic wealth that the water committee hired a full time worker to maintain the unit. As the years passed and more money was collected, the committee elected to renovate the water distribution center by placing the unit in a covered pavilion and displaying a television to provide entertainment to the community members waiting in line. The water council, doubling its revenue between 2005 and 2009, is now organizing a micro-finance operation to encourage further innovation in the community. The opportunity emerging from the arsenic crisis is community-centric, organic, and local to their needs.
The Tagore-Sengupta Foundation encourages the development of social and economic wealth by finding the opportunity in every crisis. One fundamental piece to find opportunities where none are easily visible is education.

Schools as sites of transformation

During the last ten years, T-S president Arup Sengupta has been actively associated with a school in a poor suburban neighborhood of Kolkata. The school has approximately six hundred students mostly from families below the poverty level, earning less than one US dollar per day.

One of the areas Sengupta first directed his attention was an adequate sanitation facility. He therefore arranged to install pumps, lay pipes, and hang an overhead tank to provide running water into bathrooms. Ceiling fans were provided in every classroom to overcome extreme heat and humidity. Next, three personal computers were purchased, a room was refurbished, and a teacher was trained and financed to teach basic computer skills. In every classroom, Tagore’s internationally acclaimed poem “Where the mind is without fear” is hung to inspire students.

Sengupta continues to teach a class every year to identify needy yet intelligent students, and subsequently arranges additional private tuitions. Recently, two sisters from the Mandal family who migrated from Bangladesh have been admitted to Jadavpur University, one of the top institutions in the nation, and supported by Sengupta.

In the future, the Tagore-Sengupta Foundation wishes to help design a child-friendly science curriculum for upper secondary school in Cambodia centered on teaching students how to maintain an arsenic water filtration unit. Combining water, sanitation, and education will have a lasting effect on communities around the world and the Tagore-Sengupta Foundation wishes to light one candle at a time in hopes of creating a better world.