Slow poison

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  Fluorosis affected Karekurappa, 55, in a village near Bagepalli town in Karnataka’s Chickaballapur district. - G. R. N. SOMASHEKAR
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Arsenic and fluoride contaminated water has condemned millions to live wasted lives in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Business Line visited several villages in the affected regions for this special report by A. Srinivas.

Sixty-nine-year-old Renubala Ari of Deganga village in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district is counting her last days. But it is not her death that worries her.

Blind in both eyes and with painful lesions all over her body – the effects of arsenic poisoning (or arsenicosis) caused due to drinking contaminated groundwater – Renubala fears that her children and grandchildren are likely to meet the same fate as her, sooner or later.

If more than a million people in West Bengal suffer from debilitating arsenicosis, in Andhra Pradesh, and the northern and western States in particular, water poisoning takes another form: fluorosis.

Eighty per cent of the students at the Government Primary School at Khudabhakshpally in Nalgonda district of AP, show signs of fluorosis of various magnitude. Four of them use wheelchairs. Sirisha, 10, is a bright student. Her three siblings are down with fluorosis.

FLUOROSIS PROBLEM

In Bagepalli town as well as in other parts of Chickballapur and Kolar districts, the water table is well below 1,000 feet. Says C. V. Nagaraj, a human rights activist based in Kolar who has been extensively involved in the fluorosis issue: “The fluoride contamination level in many places would have increased from 3 mg/litre a decade back to about 4.5-5 mg/litre now, due to the falling water table in a dry area. Therefore, the extent and severity of fluorosis has increased.”......