Abstract
Globally, ~1 billion people, mostly residing in Africa and South Asia (e.g. India), still lack access to clean drinking water and sanitation. Resulting, unsafe disposal of fecal waste from open-defecation to nearby drinking water sources severely endanger public health. Until recently, India had a huge open-defecating population, leading declining public health from water-borne diseases like diarrhoea by ingesting polluted water, mostly sourced to groundwater. However, in recent past, sanitation development to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has been encouraged throughout India, but their effect to groundwater quality and human health conditions are yet-unquantified. Here, for the first time, using long term, high-spatial resolution measurements (>1.7 million) across India and analyses, we quantified that over the years, groundwater fecal coliform concentration (2002–2017, −2.56 ± 0.06%/year) and acute diarrheal cases (1990–2016, −3.05 ± 0.01%/year) have significantly reduced, potentially influenced by sanitation development (1990–2017, 2.63 ± 0.01%/year). Enhanced alleviation of groundwater quality and human health have been observed since 2014, with initiation of acceletated constructions of sanitation infrastructures through Clean India (Swachh Bharat) Mission. However, the goal of completely faecal-pollution free, clean drinking water is yet to be achieved. We also evaluated the suitability of using satellite-derived night-time light (NLan, 1992–2013, 4.26 ± 0.05%/year) as potential predictor for such economic development. We observed that in more than 80% of the study region, night-time light demonstrated to be a strong predictor for observed changes in groundwater quality, sanitation development and water-borne disease cases. While sanitation and economic development can improve public health, poor education level and improper human practices can strongly influence on water-borne diseases loads and thus health in parts of India.
Highlights
“Access to safe water and sanitation, and sound management of freshwater ecosystems are essential to human health and to environmental sustainability and economic prosperity1”
It is yet to achieve the goal of no-fecal coliform concentration (FC) clean drinking water
Since 2014, it has been observed that the FC concentrations have reduced at an enhanced rate of 2.33%/year and AD has alleviated at the rate of 2.96%/year
Summary
“Access to safe water and sanitation, and sound management of freshwater ecosystems are essential to human health and to environmental sustainability and economic prosperity1”. >2 billion people) still lack access to improved water and sanitation, and predominantly live in the lower income, rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa and South-Southeast Asia[3] Universal access to such basic human requirements would need urgent management of fecal waste and ending the unsafe practice of open defecation that causes severe risk to public health by exposure to fecal-pathogen polluted water[4], unequally impacting the poor, women and children in developing countries[5]. Local-scale studies described these efforts to be “infrastructure-centered” and “supply-led” and have only moderate effect[14,16,17] Notwithstanding these efforts and observations, it is unclear how these interventions would eventually influence the water-borne pathogens in drinking water and improving public health, over a long time. This helped us to evaluate the effect of changing land-use and urbanization on evolving water quality
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