Pump Brings Water Revolution to Bangladesh : Asia: Simple inventions can improve lives of the poor and aid the environment. A stove that needs little fuel, for example, could save Himalayan forests.

It looks simple, and it is. A contraption of metal cylinders, bamboo levers and plastic pipes, it pumps well water to irrigate fields.

But until a Bangladeshi farmer invented the foot-powered pump 20 years ago, irrigation was a daily problem for Bangladesh’s poor farmers. During the dry season from mid-October into April, they had to buy water from rich landowners, and rarely could feed their families for long.

The pump invented by farmer Narendra Nath Deb is now mass-produced by an American development agency, and is one of scores of simple devices that can make a big difference in the Third World.

Other devices, like ingenious stoves that use less fuel, are proving that for a tool to be effective, it doesn’t have to be complicated to make or maintain.

Deb’s pump has doubled the production of tens of thousands of poor farmers in low-lying Bangladesh, which is often flooded by monsoons and typhoons but also is prone to drought. Its main crops--rice, jute and tea--need irrigation during the dry months.

Shamsuddin Ahmed once could grow only enough rice on his one-third-acre farm to feed his six-member family three months a year. He worked the rest of the year as a day laborer on a river ferry or in someone else’s field.

That changed last year, thanks to the irrigation pump he bought and installed for only 1,200 takas, which is about $30. Today, the crops he grows feed his family at least six months a year, no matter how little rain falls during the dry season. So now he works away from the farm only six months.

“It’s a small wonder. It has done magic to my family,” Ahmed said, as he worked the foot-operated machine to pump underground water into his rice field in Algirchar, a poor village 40 miles northeast of Dhaka, the capital.

Set up behind his mud-and-straw hut, the pump can draw two quarts of water a second. When he gets too tired, his wife and children have no trouble taking over.

The pump is one example of how cheap, simple devices can make life easier for subsistence farmers around the world.

A stove developed in Vietnam that burns rice husks is now on the market in the Philippines and Burma for about $30.

In Nepal, villagers in the high Himalayas are using smokeless stoves that pipe away excess energy to heat water, burning one-third the wood of an open fire. Conservationists also hope the simple stoves in mountain inns, installed for less than $20, will slow the destruction of forests along the hiking trails used by thousands of tourists each year.

But few innovations have had as large an impact as the treadle pump, which also is in use now in India and Nepal.

Today, 500,000 Bangladeshi farmers have it. If as many as 1.8 million--30% of the country’s farmers--use it, “this will be a revolution,” said Zaharul Karim, director of the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council.

If all 6 million farmers used it, production would go up by $2.1 billion, according to a study by Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, a state-run think tank. That could have political importance in a country where violent demonstrations almost always follow any dramatic increase in the price of staple foods.

Deb came up with the idea for the treadle pump in the early 1970s while working on his farm in the northern village of Ulipur.

Its commercial use did not begin until 1986 when International Development Enterprises, a Denver-based volunteer group, modified the design and set up a marketing network.

The treadle pump became in instant hit in Bangladesh, where most small farmers cannot afford to buy water that wealthier farmers get from deep wells using powered pumps that cost $500 and up.

Ahmed, the farmer in Algirchar, once paid 1,500 takas ($37) a season to buy water. He paid less than that for his new pump, and it should last seven years or more.

“Deep tube wells put us at the mercy of rich farmers who own them. By owning my own treadle pump I can get water whenever I want,” said Abdur Rahim, Ahmed’s neighbor.

In 1989, 49,000 small farmers with less than one acre of land bought the treadle pumps. Last year, 200,000 farmers bought one, and that could double within three years.

And what of the inventor? Although Deb has no patent, he has turned from farming to manufacturing his modified pump and has become moderately wealthy by selling it to the agencies that market it.