IIT Kharagpur researchers: Economic growth helping keep diseases at bay
My Nation (April 30, 2019)
New Delhi: A study by researchers at IIT Kharagpur has claimed that economic growth is reducing faecal pollution in groundwater in North India. Faecal pollution is considered to be the key factor for the spreading of water-borne diseases in the densely populated Indo-Ganges-Brahmaputra river basin.
About 100,000 children in India die every year from waterborne enteric diseases like diarrhoea, researchers said.
The study, published in the International Journal of Information Management, made first-time observations on significant reduction of faecal coliform pathogen concentration in the spatially variable groundwater from 2002 to 2017.
"Looking beyond the country globally, more than two billion people, mostly living in economically stressed areas of Africa and South Asia still do not have access to basic sanitation, and more than one billion still opt for open defecation," said Professor Abhijit Mukherjee, from the Department of Geology and Geophysics at IIT Kharagpur in West Bengal. (Read More)