Marathwada's troubled waters harm your bones

Not many in Sawarkhed village of Nanded’s Mahoor taluka smile or laugh unreservedly. When interacting with a stranger, they are mindful of their mouths. “It is embarrassing,” says Rameshwar Jadhav. As he speaks, you can see that all his teeth are rotten and misshapen, their colours ranging from yellow ochre to dark brown.

Ramaeshwar, 22, an agricultural labourer, is not the only one with this problem in Sawarkhed, a village of around 500 people. Almost every adult’s teeth here have deteriorated in varying degrees. Many also have a limp or are permanently hunched over as they slowly make their way through the narrow alleys and green fields. Those who can walk, need frequent breaks. The entire village appears to move in slow motion in a different era.

This tableau has been created by what’s inside the earth, beneath the feet of the villagers: the groundwater here contains fluoride. This is a chemical that is naturally present in soil, rocks and groundwater.  But in concentrated form, it can be extremely harmful. According to the World Health Organisation, more than 1.5 mg of fluoride per litre of water is dangerous for consumption. In Sawarkhed, it was 9.5 mg when the Groundwater Surveys and Development Agency (GSDA) checked the fluoride level around 2012-13.

 “The formation of flourosis depends on the extent of flouride in water, and therefore its progression varies," says Dr. Ashish Ardhapurkar, a physician based in Nanded town.  Once the deterioration sets in, he says, it cannot be reversed. "But children are protected from it. They become vulnerable to dental flourosis only after they develop wisdom teeth, and to skeletal flourosis after their bone growth, which mostly happens after the age of six."

“Fluorosis can be checked in the initial stages,” says Satish Berajdar, a well-known dentist in Latur town. “If not, the effects are far-reaching. People are permanently handicapped, their teeth are destroyed. It reduces the body’s immunity and overall ability to cope as well, and makes you vulnerable to other diseases.”

But the people of Sawarkhed didn’t know this for a long time.  They kept consuming the contaminated water until 2006, when the state provided a tap at a dug well. That well is around one kilometre away, and even today is not sufficient for the drinking needs of the entire village. Whereas handpumps on borewells are at nearly every doorstep. “We knew the water we drank [from handpumps] was not the purest. But nobody told us it was so dangerous. And when you are desperate for water, you have to consume what you get,” says Madhukar Jadhav, a 55-year-old farmer and agricultural labourer.

By the time awareness started creeping in, it was too late for Madhukar’s sister Anushaya Rathod (in the cover photo on top). “It  started with pain in the knees [some 30 years ago],” she says, her teeth all gone. “The pain then spread across the body. Eventually, the shape and size of my bones changed, reducing me to a cripple.”

When the pain in the joints began, the family did not imagine it was due to the water they were drinking. "We thought it was an ordinary illness," Madhukar says. "Later, when it became alarming, we took her to many doctors in Yavatmal, Nanded and Kinwat. I must have spent over one lakh rupees, borrowing most of it from relatives and friends. But no treatment worked and I did not have the capacity to spend more. Eventually, we gave up…” 

Anushaya, now in her 50s,  cannot stand on her feet anymore. She can hardly move around, and has to use her hands because her bony legs remain folded into each other. This has been her condition for over 10 years. “I have become a burden on my family,” she says. “I live with my brother, he looks after me. But I feel guilty I cannot do anything for him and his family.”

Madhukar has seen his own productivity fall over the years. “If I work for an hour on the farm, I have to take a break of half an hour. My back aches a lot,” he says. “It is a task to even attend to nature’s call. The body is so inflexible.”  Madhukar cultivates cotton, tur and jowar on his six acres. He also works as an agricultural labourer. “Nobody pays me the amount that labourers usually get [around Rs. 250 a day]. It is saddening to see your worth go down.”

Pankaj Mahale’s family too tried various treatments, but he lost his 50-year-old father six years ago. "He had skeletal flourosis," Pankaj, 34, says. "He was bent from the waist. We took him to bone specialists, to doctors in Nanded and even Nagpur. But they said my father's bones have become so brittle that even a minor jerk could break him down. They gave him calcium medicines that cost 3,000 rupees per month. To take him to doctors in various places, we had to hire a private car. The expenses ran into lakhs by the time he died. The district administration did not offer any free medical help."   

Local journalist Dharmaraj Hallyale, who has followed this crisis closely, says even after tap water was made available in Sawarkhed in 2006, for four years the tap did not function properly. “There would be no electricity,” he says. “So the pump wouldn’t work. I wrote to the district collector and the state government. I followed it up for a month, before it was eventually fixed in 2010.” Hallyale also filed an RTI (Right to Information) application seeking information for the entire state – and 25 districts [out of a total of 36] turned out to have fluoride in their water sources in varying degrees.