Alternative water supplies to replace arsenic polluted groundwater in Bangladesh

Bangladesh faces a major challenge in supplying safe potable water to the most of her 160 million people. The drinking water in Bangladesh is largely sourced from handpump tubewells, which draw drinking water from shallow aquifer, which has been badly polluted with Arsenic in recent years. Although various methods have been proposed to solve this problem, an acceptable and sustainable solution is yet to be achieved. As an alternative, rainwater can be harvested and used to secure the safe potable water for Bangladesh. This paper proposes an alternative community-based rainwater-fed surface water supply scheme to provide fresh drinking water to the affected regions. It is argued that rainwater is a viable alternative fresh water source which can be preserved in a community owned purpose built surface water lake. A simple low-cost water treatment and distribution system can then be built to treat and supply the lake water. Various challenges for such an alternative water supply scheme are discussed in the paper.