Desalination of drinking water needed

Thousands of rural people in the northern Turkmen province of Dashoguz and parts of neighbouring Lebap province lack access to clean drinking water, while those in Dashoguz have to consume high salinity water in periods of low water flow, resulting in serious health implications. "The situation in terms of providing clean drinking water in rural areas of Lebap and Dashoguz provinces is that [only] between 10 to 30 percent of the rural population can have access to it," Arslan Berdiyev, a United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) project officer, told IRIN in the capital, Ashgabat. Access to clean drinking water in these areas means that there is a centralised water supply system where water can be treated, filtered and chlorinated before being supplied to the local population, Berdiyev explained. "The issue is not a lack of water resources but a lack of systems supplying water from source to the population," the UNICEF water, sanitation and hygiene education officer noted, adding that another issue was the quality of the water. Although water in the Amudarya river - one of the key water sources in Central Asia and the main water source for the desert nation of Turkmenistan, supplying about 80 percent of its expanding needs - is fresh in Lebap province and could be utilised after filtering, in Dashoguz province it becomes salinised. "Between Turkmenabad [formerly known as Chardzhev] and the Tuya-Muyun reservoir there are a number of drainage discharges collected from the Bukhara oasis and Karshi steppe [of neighbouring Uzbekistan] and a number of drainage reservoirs on the right bank of the Amudarya," the UNICEF official said. According to a report on water issues in Turkmenistan by Nikolai and Leah Orlovsky from the Jacob Blaustein Institute for Desert Research at Ben-Gurion University, 45 percent of drainage water in the Amudarya River basin flows chaotically into desert areas adjacent to the irrigated zone, while about 40 percent returns to the river network. The salinity of the Amudarya River water is 0.9-1.0 g/l (grams per litre) in its upper part, while in the delta area it reaches 2-3 g/l. Some experts note that soils in the Amudarya basin have naturally high salinity and extensive usage of lands in the area for agricultural needs, particularly cotton harvesting, envisages extensive usage of water to keep the salinity low, resulting in huge level of drainage waters flowing into the Amudarya. "No matter how you disinfect water it is already salinised [in Dashoguz] and it doesn't comply with state standards," Berdiyev maintained. Turkmen state standards consider water salinised if a litre of it contains more than one gram of salt. "It [water] is getting fresher in spring when there are high waters, and during low waters in the [Amudarya] river the level of drainage in fresh water changes and salinity reaches between 1.2 and 1.6 g/l in Amudarya," he explained. A former resident of Dashoguz province told IRIN in Ashgabat that drinking water was indeed very salinised in his former home province. "You cannot drink water in our region because it is very salinised. But we have no choice and consume it." Health officials warn that consumption of high salinity water can harm people's health. "Hard water salts remain in human tissues, [resulting in] stones and sand in kidneys," Berdiyev noted. According to some estimates, up to 40 percent of the population living in the Aral Sea region suffer from kidney problems. The region comprises Khorezm province and Karakalpakstan in Uzbekistan and Dashoguz province in Turkmenistan along with Kzyl-Orda and South Aral provinces in Kazakhstan. UNICEF is more concerned that high salinity water affects the nutrition system of children, causing anaemia. "What one eats is not [fully] absorbed, no matter how much a child eats. And it of course affects the development of the child," Berdiyev said. UNICEF spent some US $300,000 in 2003 to address the issue with a tiny sum of $20,000 left for this year. As for possible solutions to the problem, Berdiyev said that the only option was constructing water-desalination systems. "Not only water purification but particularly desalination systems are needed because ordinary traditionally-used technology doesn't desalinise water. And in the water treatment chain, desalinisation should be included in Dashoguz." In an effort to tackle the issue, UNICEF installed a compact water desalination system with a capacity of 120 cubic metres per day in the Dashoguz region, another was installed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) with a number of smaller systems. Meanwhile, some experts say that in order to address the issue over the longer term, government involvement is needed, with huge investment programmes improving water quality protection aimed at the elimination of drainage water discharge into the Amudarya and rural drinking water supply.