Fifteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

The State of West Bengal is commonly understood as a water surplus state, but problems of access are not just caused by physical inaccessibility of water. Quality aspects like arsenic in groundwater hinder access to clean water in rural areas, where most households are dependent on groundwater. This study considers the inaccessibility of the ground water reality in rural West Bengal in a village with arsenic contamination. The paper explores inaccessibility of clean water with relation to quality and time taken to acquire clean water. Through personal accounts, the paper discusses difficult access to clean water in West Bengal to be one of the most potent and underrepresented problems of water security in India. The paper leans on the established research of arsenic contamination to delve into the gap in awareness with regards to drinking contaminated water and its effects on health. Alongside this, the paper also finds a distorted effect of non-accessibility between men and women, with the latter having to compensate for more when clean water isn’t readily available.