Kits for water quality

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Anantpur: With the increased contamination of drinking water affecting the health of rural people, the government has initiated steps to test the quality of water at all the villages.
Though the task was gigantic to check quality of water with limited number of employees from various departments concerned, the government is using the services of Asha volunteers and Anganwadi workers of respective areas to check quality of water supplied to the rural people.
As part of providing quality water, the Rural Water Supply(RWS)) department is conducting training programmes to the Asha volunteers and Anganwadi workers over testing drinking water samples.
A separate kit was provided to the volunteers to carry out the tests of water samples in the villages.
Anantapur RWS superintendent engineer Prabhakar Rao told this correspondent that about 9 tests would be carried out by using special water testing kit.
He said that the kit would immediately test the quality of water and declare in fraction of minutes whether the water was potable to drink or not.
The main source of drinking water in the rural areas of Anantpur district is either borewells or tap water from gram panchayats.
He said that the water in open wells would pose health threats due to contamination of chemicals. “Each water sample would undergo 9 tests including percentage of fluorine, solids, nitrates, hardness, ph and colour etc,” he said.These tests are mandatory as they provide complete information over the contents in the water besides alerting people over saving themselves from water borne diseases, he pointed out.
The trained workers would also create awareness among the people over steps of cleaning water before its consumption in rural areas, Mr Prabhakar Rao said.
The excess percentage of fluoride content in the water would cause many health problems to the people, particularly in many parts of Kadiri and Madakasira areas, he said.
The superintendent engineer said the workers would alert the gram panchayats to add bleaching power as part of cleaning water and to prevent adverse affect of bacteria
and other biological contaminates.
All the 1,001 gram panchayats in Anantapur district have been focused to conduct water tests regularly, he said.