On a warm April morning in Raspur, 12-year-old Uma Saha stands at the community tap with her school bag on one shoulder and an empty bottle in her hand. She turns the blue handle and watches clear water rise and swirl into the plastic. Around her, other children do the same before setting off for class. For the first time in living memory, the village has a place where parents tell their children to fill up before they leave home.

Raspur lies in Mohammad Bazar tehsil, about 15 kilometres from Suri in Birbhum district, West Bengal. The village has around 300 houses and a population of a little over 2,000, most of them from the Oraon community. For decades, they drew drinking water from eight tube wells that residents say were laced with iron, arsenic and other contaminants, along with high total dissolved solids.

In April 2025, a new ultrafiltration water plant began running here. For families who had long lived with stomach upsets, stained utensils and the taste of metal, the change feels simple and profound.

“We suffered chronic water shortage for years,” says resident Champa Saha. “Our whole village relied on tube-well water, which contained iron and arsenic. We had to drink that water because we could not buy jars from the market. On our request, an organisation helped us get clean drinking water.”

The plant sits on a 500-square-foot plot purchased for the project. It sources groundwater through a deep bore and runs it through sand and charcoal filtration, then a membrane, followed by UV treatment. The system stores water in a 1,000-litre tank and supplies it through a community tap. Families now come with bottles and canisters twice a day when the tank is filled.

For nearly eight decades after Independence, Raspur’s residents had no access to safe drinking water. Over time, the wells ran dry, and the tube wells that replaced them began yielding poor-quality water.

“Most of the tube wells were either broken or gave us red,........

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