16. A Greenhouse Pot Experiment to Study Arsenic Accumulation in Rice Varieties Selected from Gangetic Bengal, India

It is predicted that around 100 million people living in the Ganga-Meghna- Brahmaputra plain are at the risk of serious arsenic toxicity through exposure of contaminated groundwater (Chakraborti D et al., Groundwater arsenic contamination in Ganga-Meghna-Brahmaputra plain, its health effects and an approach for mitigation. In: UNESCO UCI groundwater conference proceedings. http://​www.​groundwater-conference.​uci.​edu/​proceedings.​html#chapter1, 2008). Groundwater arsenic contamination in the Gangetic Bengal has been termed as the largest mass poisoning in the history of human kind (Smith et al., Bull WHO 78(9):1093–1103, 2000). Arsenic pollution has spread in fourteen out of total nineteen districts of Gangetic Bengal (Chakraborti et al., Mol Nutr Food Res 53(5):542–551, 2009). Application of arsenic-contaminated groundwater for irrigation in Gangetic Bengal has shown to influence accumulation of arsenic in rice, the major staple food in West Bengal (Meharg, Trends Plant Sci 9:415–417, 2004, 2009; Signes-Pastor et al., J Agric Food Chem 56(20):9469–9474, 2008; Bhattacharya et al., Paddy Water Environ 8(1):63–70, 2010a; Samal et al., J Environ Sci Health Part A: Environ Sci Eng 46:1259–1265, 2011; Banerjee et al., Sci Rep 3, Article number: 2195, 2013; Santra et al., Procedia Environ Sci 18:2–13, 2013). Rice is an efficient accumulator of arsenic than any other cereal crops (Su et al. Plant Soil 328:27–34, 2010) and consumption of rice has been termed as an important source of inorganic arsenic intake to human body (Meharg et al., Environ Sci Technol 43(5):1612–1617, 2009).