杏吧原创

Dipankar Chakraborti comes from a small village in West Bengal, India. He is an analytical chemist and epidemiologist. He is now director of the school of environmental sciences at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, West Bengal, and advises globally on the problems of arsenic pollution.

What鈥檚 the problem with taking help from the west?

In my experience, when you have million-dollar projects not much trickles down to the villages. Not after the government and local officials and foreign consultants, with their five-star hotels and travel and per-diem expenses, have all taken their share. The Bangladeshi government got a 鈥渟oft鈥� loan from the World Bank to assess the arsenic crisis on condition that they brought in foreign experts.

But these 鈥渆xperts鈥� were seeing the problem for the first time. They sat for a month in Dhaka while we told them what the situation was. These experts recommended treatment plants to remove arsenic from the village tube wells. More millions of dollars were spent. But 80 per cent of those treatment plants, that鈥檚 300 of them, are lying on the street and nobody is using them. The plants were never tested with the kind of water we have here. They clog with silt and iron unless they are washed out daily. And after a month, I found water coming from the treatment plants had more arsenic than the water coming straight from the tube wells.

After such a fiasco, surely the villagers should say how they want the cleaning to be done.

Well, yes. But the villagers don鈥檛 own the treatment plants. They are not asked where they should go, or trained to maintain them. They see the equipment as government equipment. The government only stopped installing them after we published a paper in Environmental Science and Technology, exposing their failure. Now the manufacturers want to install bigger treatment plants. But I expect the same thing will happen.

What about the local governments?

In West Bengal and Bangladesh in the 1990s, they denied the problem for years while millions more tube wells were being sunk. I had to travel by night to visit villages, so I wouldn鈥檛 be caught while I collected my samples to expose the problem. Later, in Bihar in 2002, when we exposed the problem there, the authorities accused me of causing a panic and said that there were just a few isolated cases. But now I have 15,000 samples of water from Bihar and 12 districts are affected. We found the first cases in Assam in 2004. People there reacted by telling me that if I went there again I would never return home.

Is the epidemic still spreading?

Yes, much of the Ganges plain is affected: that is 500 million people 鈥� at risk. Many wells are gradually becoming more poisoned. There are no proper statistics, but here in West Bengal I know of many villages where 100 people with physical symptoms of arsenic poisoning like skin lesions have died young from cancers.

What鈥檚 your background?

I am an analytical chemist. I worked for a decade in western countries, including in Texas cotton fields, where arsenic accumulation from pesticides was causing a problem. In 1988, on a visit home to West Bengal, I went to a friend鈥檚 village, where people were suffering arsenic poisoning. So I decided I should work on the problem at home. I set up my laboratory using money I had earned abroad. We took outside funds for a while, but soon I found that the funding agencies hide the results and I was not free to speak. So I stopped taking external funds. Now I can say what I want.

鈥淚 don鈥檛 take external funds to run my lab, so I can say what I want鈥�

So where does your money come from?

We charge for our analytical services. We also sell our reports, CDs and videos, and I take $100 from people who come here for discussions. The money is divided between the university and my department. Right now we have money in the bank. The interest is paying the salaries of several of my 20 staff.

We have a great deal of expertise now. We have analysed 200,000 water samples and taken 40,000 hair samples from patients with arsenic poisoning. I have seen 15,000 patients with my own eyes. I get letters from health professionals in other countries who have to travel hundreds of kilometres just to find a single patient with arsenic poisoning. We鈥檝e ended up with an amazing database on arsenic poisoning. Quite unique. The US has a growing arsenic problem. But when they need data on arsenic poisoning, we are the only place they can come.

Do you help victims?

Yes, unlike the aid agencies and government, we spend a lot of time and money in the villages. We give the people the results of our analysis, we find them doctors and help them to get clean water. We refer people to hospitals we work with. And every month we send thousands of rupees to help families where the main earner has died. Here in West Bengal the arsenic problem was discovered more than two decades ago. But still there are many villages where they drink from tube wells that poison them. Some villages have been abandoned. In others, if you stop people at random in the street, you find many who have symptoms.

What鈥檚 your solution?

The government and the outside agencies are only interested in expensive technical solutions like water treatment. I don鈥檛 believe that will work. We need alternative sources of water 鈥� often collecting rainwater from rooftops is a better solution, or traditional dug wells if they can be kept free of contamination with sewage.

Sometimes deep tube wells do provide arsenic-free water. But underground water here contains many other dangerous metals like magnesium, uranium and boron, as well as fluoride. And we have noticed that there are more poisoning cases in poor villages where they have bad nutrition. It is a complicated social and scientific problem, but we believe the expertise to solve it is right here, not in the offices of foreign aid agencies.