When Water Kills: The Arsenic Crisis in Eastern Uttar Pradesh

For two decades, a public-health nightmare has been burgeoning in the Ballia district of Uttar Pradesh, in the form of arsenic contamination of the groundwater. The residents continue to suffer from painful and debilitating ailments with symptoms of arsenic poisoning, some of them fatal. With no meaningful help from successive governments, residents of the impoverished region can but helplessly narrate their cases, the state’s apathy and negligence.