Surrounded by water on every side, the people of coastal Bangladesh cannot drink a single drop of it. The rivers, the channels, the vast stretches of tidal flatland, all of it salt. Even routine household tasks become a daily ordeal. Yet the scale of this crisis rarely makes headlines for long. An estimated 20 million people living along the coast are affected by varying degrees of salinity in their drinking water, sourced from natural ponds, rivers and shallow aquifers that have long since been contaminated. A UNDP survey found that 73 percent of residents in five coastal sub-districts of Satkhira drink saline water every single day . These are not people on the edge of a desert. They live in a delta where water is everywhere, yet none of it is safe.
The geography of this crisis has been decades in the making. Rising sea levels are pushing saltwater deeper into the mainland than ever before. Projections indicate that Bangladesh could face a sea level rise of up to 50 centimetres by 2050, and that even this moderate increase could raise salinity levels by 1 to 5 parts per thousand across 50 to 65 percent of the coastal zone. The consequences are not theoretical. In 2007, Cyclone Sidr struck with wind speeds of 240 kilometres per hour, killing 3,406 people. Two years later, Cyclone Aila flooded entire sub-districts with saline water and destroyed over 243,000 houses. Each major storm does more than destroy homes-- it poisons freshwater ponds and shallow tube wells for months or years after the waters recede.
Then there is the problem of rivers running dry. Freshwater flows from the Ganges have declined sharply since India's commissioning of the Farakka Barrage in 1975. Research shows a statistically significant decrease in freshwater inflow through the Gorai River since the early 1980s, which has led directly to increased downstream salinity in the southwestern region. A healthy river flow maintains a liveable balance of salt and freshwater; without it, the sea fills the gap. Four of Bangladesh's ten major rivers now carry water flows below the minimum needed to sustain local ecosystems. In their absence, the tide moves inland unchecked.
Alongside these natural and geopolitical pressures sits a wound that is almost entirely self-inflicted. Since the 1980s, shrimp farming marketed as 'blue gold' transformed thousands of hectares of paddy land into saline ponds. To create the conditions shrimp require, farmland where rice was once grown was fundamentally altered: saline water was let in, sometimes by deliberately damaging the embankments that had protected paddies and freshwater ponds. According to the Bangladesh Frozen Foods Exporters Association, shrimp are now cultivated across 81 percent of available coastal land . The long-term damage is immense. Research estimates that approximately 1.5 million hectares of land have been salinised over the past three decades due to the uncontrolled growth of saltwater shrimp farming . The soil's fertility is gone, the freshwater aquifers beneath are contaminated and the natural reservoirs that once held freshwater have been destroyed.
The consequences reach well beyond thirst. Research published in the journal Elementa found that people consuming slightly saline drinking water (1,000 to 2,000 mg per litre) were 17 percent more likely to be hypertensive, while those consuming moderately saline water (above 2,000 mg per litre) faced a 42 percent greater risk. Pregnant women face particular danger. Studies conducted in Dacope found significant links between sodium intake from drinking water and both pre-eclampsia and gestational hypertension. In southwestern Bangladesh, more than half of women in two sub-districts reported infections or inflammation of the reproductive system, linked to prolonged exposure to saline water. Some women have undergone surgery to remove their uteruses simply to end years of untreated gynecological illness caused by the water they had no choice but to use.
The burden of fetching water falls almost entirely on women. According to UNDP, women in coastal areas walk two to five kilometres daily to fetch safe drinking water, sometimes two or three times a day, spending up to six hours in the process-- time that cannot be used for income generation, education or family care. A BMC Women's Health study found that 93.3 percent of women with gynecological problems had to travel more than one kilometre to access safe water. The Daily Star reports that during the dry season, when rivers and ponds become brackish, women are often forced to spend as much as 20 percent of their household income buying treated water from vendors. This is not a story of individual hardship. It is structural deprivation, baked into the landscape by decades of climate change, policy failure and unchecked commercial interest.
The deeper failure is one of institutional imagination. We keep treating this as a series of separate problems rather than one interconnected crisis. Ministries and NGOs work in parallel without meaningful coordination. Expensive technological solutions get prioritised over nature-based ones. And the people who live with this crisis every day, especially the women who spend their mornings walking for water, are almost never meaningfully consulted when policies are being drawn up. Soil salinity in Bangladesh's coastal region grew by 26.7 percent between 1973 and 2009, and projections suggest the affected area continues to expand by roughly 146 square kilometres every year. That number is not slowing down. The question is whether our response will ever move fast enough to catch it.
The writer is a student, Begum Rokeya University
