The report titled "Progress for Children: A Report Card on Water and Sanitation" charts progress towards Millennium Development Goal (MDG)-7, which includes the target of halving the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015.

The report, however, said although Bangladesh made impressive progress in sanitation coverage, safe water is still a challenge and the country is likely to miss one of the MDGs to bring 86 per cent of its population under safe drinking water coverage due to arsenic contamination of its groundwater.

More than 30 per cent of the tube wells sunk in recent decades are contaminated with arsenic above the nationally recommended level, Abdul Bari, chief engineer of Department of Public Health Engineering said.

Meanwhile, in sanitation coverage, South Asia has the most severe urban-rural disparities in the world, and although Bangladesh's performance in this respect is satisfactory, still there exists disparities between the urban and rural areas. The access to proper sanitation stands at 51 per cent for urban dwellers compared to 35 per cent of their rural counterparts.

Still hundreds of children under five die each year across the country for the scarcity of pure drinking water and sanitation, Louis-George Arsenault, Unicef representative in Bangladesh, said while launching the publication.

"Under five mortality in South Asia, 92 child deaths per 1000 live births, is the highest in the developing world outside sub-Saharan Africa, where the rate is 171 per 1000 live births," the report said.

Water and sanitation facilities could also reduce diarrhoea related diseases in young children by more than one third, it added.

Water and sanitation related illness can affect children's school attendance and academic performance, Birendra Sreshtha, officer-in-charge of Water and Environmental Sanitation Section, Unicef, said, adding that girls in particular, may be deterred from schooling by the need to fetch and carry water for their families, and by the lack of separate sanitation facilities.

He emphasised community planning and monitoring to create community ownership in projects regarding water and sanitation.