It's water, water everywhere in this village but every drop that the people here drink drags them closer to death. Ground water, the only source of drinking water here, has a high content of arsenic — at 100 times the permissible limit — resulting in dozens of deaths every year due to liver ailments and miscarriages.This village, located in the Gangetic delta, wears a desolate look with most houses locked. The residents have fled, leaving messages on the walls of their houses, telling people not to drink water from the contaminated tube-wells which have been painted red.Of the 26 wells in Ojhapatty hamlet in Semaria, 23 have been declared unusable. The other there are also contaminated but the arsenic content is yet to cross the danger level. ‘‘We still drink from this well,’’ says Rajni Kanth Ojha of the red-painted well near his house.Scientists say the problem is not confined to this village alone and the estimated 350-million population on the Ganga delta faces the risk of arsenic poisoning. In Bangladesh and West Bengal, which are located in the lower Gangetic delta, an estimated 36 million people are found to have been drinking arsenic-contaminated water.The discovery of arsenic poisoning in more and more parts of the middle Gangetic delta in Bihar over the last one year points to a problem which has been largely overlooked by the government.That the water in Semaria is arsenic-contaminated was discovered when Kuneshwar Ojha, a resident of the village, got curious after he lost his first wife and mother to cancer and second wife had a miscarriage in 2002. Having spent years in Kolkata, Kuneshwar was familiar with the arsenic menace prevalent in 4,000 villages of West Bengal. His fears were proved true when he took water samples from Semaria to the Jadavpur University for tests.‘‘Over the 14 months that followed, we came across more cases of arsenic poisoning in Bihar villages. I am afraid the results can’t be different in other parts of the middle and upper Ganga delta,’’ says Dr Dipankar Chakravorty, director, School of Environmental Sciences, Jadavpur University, who pioneered the research on arsenic poisoning. However, the state government doesn’t seem to be bothered. Siwanand Tiwari, MLA from Semaria, says a drinking water project for the village has been sanctioned but work’s yet to begin.
