Pond Water Brings Relief to India’s ‘Arsenic Belt’

In the 1960s, as the drilling of tube wells began in eastern India, people were advised to switch to the practice of drinking groundwater to protect themselves from cholera and other water-borne epidemics. But the switch from traditional dug wells to tube wells proved fatal in the 1990s, when a high level of arsenic contamination was detected in water from tube wells in Bangladesh and in eastern India. Now, ponds provide a safer source of water. VOA's Maaz Hussain reports.