Goalmari - Bangladesh's story of water scarcity

Goalmari is a village in Bangladesh situated by the river Meghna. Nearly 20,000 inhabitants of the village are dependent on this river for their livelihood. But almost all of these 20,000 villagers suffer because of an acute scarcity of pure drinking water. What could have been a lifeline for the villagers is actually slowly killing them. The river is contaminated by high levels of arsenic and people have to travel far and wide — on foot or by boat — to access clean drinking water.

Munem Wasif, a well-known documentary photographer in Bangladesh, has captured on camera, the issues of water in rural Bangladesh. On exhibition at Alliance Francaise d'Ahmedabad (AF) as part of World Environment Day celebrations, 'Goalmari, Bangladesh's Own Island' presents a vivid picture of a problem that is not restricted to our neighbourhood, but to the entire world. Despite being contaminated by arsenic and covered most of the times by a bed of hyacinth, the Meghna river provides the villagers water for cooking, bathing, washing, fishing and in the summers, for fun. But thanks to arsenic accumulating over the years, the reddening tubewell tells a different story.

Also part of the celebrations at AF is the screening of the '7 Billion Others' project by the GoodPlanet Foundation. The programme is a video portrait of humanity shown through a collection of testimonies that brings together the stories of men and women from around the world, and the theme chosen for the screening was water. People from across the globe have given testimonies of what water means to them and the problems faced by them due to the shortage of clean drinking water.

A man from Delhi blames politicians for doing nothing about their water problems while a man from the Democratic Republic of the Congo describes a fight at a village well; a woman in Ethiopia shares the story of digging a hole 27 metres deep but getting no water, and people resorting to begging for water; a man from Madagascar calls the local water body "water of death" because that's how contaminated it is; a woman in Bangladesh says water has been causing stomach problems because people can't boil the dirty water due to the shortage of firewood.

The 40 testimonies unite people from across the globe to raise awareness of the need to take positive environmental action.