GUWAHATI: With the upcoming Lok Sabha elections barely weeks away, basic and important issues such as the worsening quality of groundwater hardly finds any mention among the poll issues.
As per the government estimates, fluoride contamination affects 23 districts and arsenic contamination affects 24 districts (out of a total of 33) in the state.
Faculty at Discipline of Earth Science in IIT Gandhinagar, Manish Kumar, compared the situation to a glass of water in which spoonfuls of sugar are added. Until the water is saturated, it will keep dissolving the sugar, and then, the granules would start settling without further dissolution.
Through extensive research on the spatial distribution of geogenic contaminants across the Brahmaputra river, Kumar and his team found the co-existence of arsenic, fluoride and uranium at some places.
It was found that several places in Assam where the water is not yet saturated to arsenic and fluoride bearing minerals and thus prone to higher arsenic and fluoride concentration in their aquifers.
In Nagaon district, for example, about 60 per cent of the samples tested were found to have "unsaturated" water.
The draft report of the Assam State Action Plan on Climate Change (2015-2020) states that Assam has been facing "continued warming of the atmosphere" and "erratic rainfall" as a result of which there have been erratic flood and drought conditions since 2003.
