Drought, the result of regional climatic variability is one of the dominant threats to environment. This study focuses on the biophysical, environmental and health issues concerning drought occurrence in northwest region of Bangladesh. Using both primary and secondary data, the analysis revealed that, during the drought period, rainfall as the dominant factor of supplying surface water and normalizing the dryness of the nature was almost 46% lower than the previous (normal) years. Similarly, average monthly sunshine hours in the drought year was about 7% higher compared to that of the normal year. On an average, groundwater level declined more than one meter compared to the previous years. Thus, many of the tubewells turned dry or failed to supply the required quantity of water for household and irrigation purposes. A significant number of surface water bodies including ponds, ditches, canals and streams had little volume of low quality water. In normal years, almost all households used hand tubewells (HTWs) as the major source of drinking water, while in the drought period only 90% households could use HTW water since substantial proportion of the HTWs turned dry. People had to collect drinking and domestic water from far distance to meet the basic requirements. Increase in temperature and prevalence of severe dust during drought periods compared to the normal years caused different health hazards including dysentery and diarrhoea due to unsafe drinking water.

ANS: autonomic nervous system; Ctrl: control; EEG: electroencephalography; HF: the power in high frequency range (0.15 Hz-0.4Hz) in the PSD relected parasympathetic activity only; HRV: heart rate variability; KSS: karolinska sleepiness scale; LF: the power in low frequency range (0.04 Hz-0.15Hz) in the PSD reflected both sympathetic and parasympathetic activity of the autonomic nervous system; LF/HF ratio: the ratio of LF to HF indicated the balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic activity; RMSSD: the root mean square of difference of adjacent RR interval; pNN50: the number of successive RR interval pairs that differed by more than 50 ms divided by the total number of RR intervals; RR interval: the differences between successive R-wave occurrence times; PSD: power spectral density; RTP: research training program; SD: standard deviation; SEM: standard error of the Mean; Vib: vibration.

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