Bangladesh is a small country in south Asia with a population of 156,595,000 according to a 2013 census and a gross domestic product of 2,810 (WHO). With most of the lands being low-lying and lots of rainfall throughout the year, the country regularly suffers from flooding which often times are deadly. The abundance of rivers (230 in total) and the amount of rainfall allowed for the country to depend on natural water resources for drinking water and farming irrigation in the past. Because their lands are fertile, about 45 percent of the country's labor force is farmers and agriculture accounts for 18% of the country's GDP. .
During the 1960s and 1970s a population surge in Bangladesh lead to an increase in agricultural activities which in turn affected the quality of surface water and natural water sources. The waters became polluted and after several outbreaks of cholera and fatal diarrhea, UNICEF, in partnership with the World Bank, installed tube-wells to provide cleaner and safer water for consumption. Because there was no law mandating checks for arsenic in tube-well projects, tests for arsenic were not conducted until several years after. About 97% of rural Bangladesh people depend on tube-wells for water and as a result several millions are exposed to arsenic in the drinking water (WHO, 2012).
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), survey data collected between 2000 and 1010 indicate that between 35 to 77 million people have been exposed to arsenic, most of whom live in 43000 villages of 68000 villages in rural Bangladesh (WHO,2012). In 1993, arsenic was first found in the tube-wells by Department of Public Health Engineering of Bangladesh but it was widely denied until international arsenic conference in Dhaka in February 1998(Chakraborti,2015). .
As of 2009, the Bangladesh Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey estimated that 27.6 million people still drank water with high levels of arsenic.