Wash Behavior: Indigenous Method For Water Purification In Rural India

Abstract

Poor quality of water and lack of sanitation facilities unequally affect women, girls and the children. It is found out by the research that 70% of India's water is contaminated and 2, 00,000 people die in India from polluted water every year. Every year more than 3.4 million people die as a result of water-related diseases, More than 30% of marginalized women are violently assaulted every year as the lack of basic sanitation forces them to travel long distances to meet their needs in the rural India.

The main sources of drinking water for many villages in India are unprotected ponds or tanks, wells, and sometimes streams and rivers which are frequented daily for collecting drinking and cooking water, washing clothes, bathing, livestock washing, etc which has an adverse impact on the health of the poor people living in drought villages.

More concentration of arsenic and fluoride in the water due to fertilisers, pesticides and other industrial waste ,the level of chemicals mixed in the water become so high, that bacterial contamination becoming the main source of water-borne diseases such as diarrhoea, cholera and typhoid. The World Bank report estimates that 21% of the communicable diseases in India are purely due to unsafe water.

The steps taken by the government is not enough to treat the polluted water into drinkable water. The lack of sufficient infrastructure, services and adequate financial support waste water treatment facilities further exacerbates the water problem. In the absence of proper treatment technologies with the government, taking into account the severity of the diseases and number of deaths occurred year after year due to drinking polluted water. The only option for both the government and the public is finding and promoting an alternative technology which is people friendly, locally available, technically feasible ensuring practicality is the indigenous technology. At the same time, it should yield good result in improving the microbiological quality of water which drastically reduces the waterborne diseases. This paper focuses on the contemporary traditional practices like seeds, roots, skins, woods being followed by the rural people in different parts of Tamil Nadu for treating the polluted water into to portable water thereby ascertaining the health of not only the women and children, but the society at large as well.