© Kamal Kishore / Reuters Sixty percent of groundwater in the Indus and Ganges river basin is too contaminated to drink or use for irrigation
Sixty percent of groundwater in the Indus and Ganges river basin -
essential for the lives of over 750 million people in India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh - is too contaminated to drink or use for irrigation, a new study says.
The groundwater of the vast Indo-Gangetic basin, named after the Indus and Ganges rivers, is contaminated and inappropriate for use, a team of scientists wrote in
Nature Geoscience.
"Within 60 percent of the aquifer [permeable rock which can contain or transmit groundwater], access to potable groundwater is restricted by excessive salinity or arsenic," says the study, which is entitled 'Groundwater quality and depletion in the Indo-Gangetic Basin mapped from in situ observations'.
Some 23 percent of the groundwater stored in the basin contains too much salt at a depth of up to 200 meters (650ft), while about 37 percent of it
"is affected by arsenic at toxic concentrations," the scientists explained.
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