I still remember my late Mama’s voice in a phone conversation in the late nineties when he told me that now we will just have to say Bismillah and drink the water here. He was referring to the higher than acceptable arsenic concentration in the drinking water from groundwater sources in Bangladesh that was discovered earlier and widely “acknowledged” around that time. Groundwater contamination by arsenic at such high quantity is not just happening in Bangladesh, it is also happening in India, China and in other parts of the world. In fact, worldwide 140 million people, especially in the developing countries, are at risk of arsenic poisoning through drinking water.

So far, we have been hearing mostly about the risks of water with high concentration of arsenic on people and what may be causing it and how many lives maybe at stake. The burning question of how we divert this inevitable calamity went unanswered for too long. The government and international organizations kept pondering upon the question giving no priority and significance to the issue. Even the organizations that initially funded the tubewell project to tap into the groundwater for drinking, where the root of the problem goes back to, failed to recognize and work towards diverting the catastrophe until many years later.

Do a chemistry professor named Abul Hassam, an expatriate Bangladeshi, finally have the answer that will provide a simple yet affordable way to avert what he calls the arsenic poisoning of drinking water “one of the worst natural disaster on earth”? Will Abul Hassam, named this year “Heroes of the Environment” by Time, with his solution save millions of lives of his fellow Bangladeshis as well as millions more elsewhere in the world? Read more about it in Time magazine.