How much would it cost to build a filter to clean the drinking water of Bangladesh?

Maybe a couple hundred dollars. could be thousands…..

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It takes about US$20 per child to get access to have access to clean and safe drinking water in Bangladesh. Therefore, for the household of having 3 children and 2 adults it may be somewhere US$100 to US$150 to install simple treatment facility to filter tube-well water containing arsenic.

Since we have population of about 150 Million people of whom about 20% gets municipal or other such government supplied water connected through pipelines to their houses, it would be a Herculean task for anybody to undertake for covering the whole population for safe drinking water supply. We need local and cheap technology supported by government programme and must be desired by the people for whom these would be going to be implemented. Therefore, lot of counselling or promotion of the basic concept of hygiene and such awareness must be started that would buttress the effort to ultimately install community wise water and waste treatment plants so that those can be kept operative and maintained in the long run too.

Bangladesh is world’s most vulnerable country in arsenic contamination of drinking water category and it has been recognized as the serious public health problem in Bangladesh. In city areas like Dhaka, Chittagong, Rajshahi, Khulna, Sylhet and Barisal there are water supplies which are mostly from Chlorine-treated deep-tubewell (DWT) pumped water and in a few cases surface water from lakes are also taken for treatment.

We need to learn to harvest the rainwater for use as safe drinking and household washing purpose. The government of Bangladesh is not campaigning to do this though we have adequate rainfall during monsoon period those are as good as distilled water (after first few days of rain when the air-suspended 9particles are washed down to earth)

The discovery of arsenic contamination in groundwater has challenged efforts to provide safe drinking-water to households in rural Bangladesh. Two nationally-representative surveys in 2000 and 2002 investigated water-usage patterns, water-testing, knowledge of arsenic poisoning, and behavioural responses to arsenic contamination. Knowledge of arsenicosis rose between the two surveys among women from 42% to 64% but awareness of consequences of arsenic remained limited; only 13% knew that it could lead to death. Behavioural responses to arsenic have been limited, probably in part because of the lack of concern but also because households are uncertain of how best to respond and have a strong preference for tubewell water even when wells are known to be contaminated. Further work conducted by the survey team highlighted the difficulties in providing alternative sources of water, with many households switching back to their original sources of water.

Hope above helps.

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