Tara – Rural Water Supply Network

photo: Abdul Motaleb and Sean Furey, in Dhaka, February 2017 (photo: Md. Nurul Osman – with thanks)

It is with great sadness that we have been informed that Mr Abdul Motaleb (61) passed away in the night of 30 April 2017.

Motaleb had over 36 years experience in the Water Supply and Environmental Sanitation Sector in Bangladesh and was widely liked and respected figure in the Bangladesh WASH sector.

He graduated from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). Dhaka in 1979 with a BSc in Water Resource Engineering and later in his career went on to gain a MSc in Sanitatary Engineering at the International Institute for Infrastructure, Hydraulic and Environmental Engineering (IHE) Delft, the Netherlands.

During his long career he worked for M/S Associated Consulting Engineers, the Department for Public Health Engineering (DPHE), King Abdul Aziz University, Jeddah, World Bank/UNDP, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), and most recently the World Bank Group and as a freelance consultant.

Among his many works and achievements, it was on the topic of handpumps where he seemed to get most pleasure – from his involvement in the development of the Tara to his expertise with the Jibon Deepset and the No. 6 – handpumps on which tens of millions of people today in Bangladesh depend every day. He was a long standing member of HTN, later RWSN, and was an active contributor to the RWSN Groundwater group.

Abdul Motaleb inspecting a HYSAWA handpump installation near Khulna, SW Bangladesh, February 2017 (Photo: Sean Furey)

I had the pleasure of working with Motaleb from January onwards this year on an end-phase review assignment for SDC and we spent 10 intense days together in south-western coastal Bangladesh, with the staff of the HYSAWA Trust Fund. He was utterly charming and humble, with a deep well of knowledge and experience. I could not have wished for a better colleague and in a very short space of time we became firm friends.

He will be greatly missed.

Sean Furey, RWSN Secretariat / Skat

Selected Publications

Technical Paper on Monitoring and Regeneration of Production Wells in Bangladesh. A paper presented by Abdul Motaleb (DPHE) and Drs. G.J.deWit (IWACO) at the seminar for Civil Engineering Division at the 34th Annual Convention of the Institute of Engineers, 1990 Dhaka Bangladesh.
Monitoring the Tara pump: An assessment of Functioning, Social Acceptability and O&M system. A report published by UNDP/World Bank Water and Sanitation Program RWSG-SA Dhaka
Quarterly Notes on Danida funded DPHE Handpump Training and Monitoring Program based on project implementation experiences published by UNDP/World Bank Water and Sanitation Program RWSG-SA Dhaka. Altogether 14 (Fourteen) HTMP Notes were prepared during 1993-1997.
Technology Development Never Stops-A story of Jibon Deepset Handpump Tubewell in Bangladesh. Paper presented in HTN Workshop on Civil Society and Government Partnership in Rural Water Supply, Hyderabad, India, 2000.
Village Organizations become Development Partners. Paper presented in 26th WEDC Conference, Dhaka 2000.
SODIS – An Arsenic Mitigation Option. Paper published in 26th WEDC Conference, Dhaka-2000.
SORAS – A Simple Arsenic Removal Process. Paper published in 26th WEDC Conference, Dhaka-2000.
Total Sanitation Approach and Practice. A case study in Watsan Partnership Project (WPP). This paper presented in 19 AGUASAN WORKSHOP 2003 on This shit drama-Are there ways out? held in Switzerland organized by SKAT during June 23-27, 2003.
Arsenic Mitigation: Action Research Findings based on project implementation experiences in Watsan Partnership Project and published by Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) in Bangladesh in June 2003.

1980 to 1990 was the International Decade of Water Supply and Sanitation and the greatest hand-pump project began.

In the new publication “How Three Handpumps Revolutionised Rural Water Supplies” from RWSN, Erich Baumann explains how three handpumps, the India Mark II, the Afridev, and the Zimbabwe Bush Pump were developed and Sean Furey explores what lessons can be learned for scaling up WASH technologies today.

As part of that UNDP and the World Bank established a joint Water & Sanitation Program (WSP, which still exists as part of the World Bank) and one of its flagship projects was the Hand-pump Project, led by Saul Arlosoroff, which rigorously tested all the hand-pumps around the world that they could get their hands on. Their final report “Community Water Supply: the Hand pump Option” (1987) is still the defining text in hand-pump literature.

The hand-pump project also defined Village Level Operation & Maintenance (VLOM), the concept of making hand-pumps easier to maintain by the users so that minor breakdowns could be repaired quickly. The India Mark II was not a VLOM pump because it required specialist tools and some skill and strength to make repairs to the pump cylinder down in the borehole. This was addressed through a design revision, imaginatively called the India Mark III. However the hand-pump team throught they could still do better and so two handpump design projects began.

Continue reading “How three handpumps revolutionised Rural Water Supplies: the Afridev”