A new study suggest that community wells in Araihazar, and probably elsewhere in Bangladesh, were not optimally allocated by the government because of elite capture. As a proxy for water access, distance calculations show that 29% of shallow wells with >50 μg/L arsenic are located within walking distance (100 m) of at least one of the 915 intermediate or deep wells. Similar calculations for a hypothetical more even distribution of deep wells show that 74% of shallow wells with >50 μg/L arsenic could have been located within 100 m of the same number of deep wells.