In the villages of Pirpainti block, along the Ganges in Bhagalpur, the water that sustains life is also slowly taking it. Years of drinking groundwater laced with arsenic have left their mark on skin, on livers, on whole families. This is a photo essay from Sidhari and its neighbouring hamlets — the people, the homes, and the hands that carry the evidence.
Photograph: Abhishek Angad / Reporters Desk
Doctors call the sequence melanosis, then keratosis, then — in the worst cases, after years — cancer. In household after household, the same hands tell the same story. What the residents describe as a skin problem is, to a physician, a warning written across the body.
The people in these frames are not statistics. They are Sila Devi, Pinki Devi, Umesh — names attached to a crisis that the maps and the reports describe in the abstract. The water is still running. This essay is a record of what it leaves behind.