Aarti Kelkar Khambete

Nainital lake is drying up, environmentalists concerned

Pune has a story similar to many other cities in India that grew exponentially without much warning. The unplanned development hit the water resources badly, increasing the city’s dependence on groundwater. Now, the city experiences water scarcity every year, even when the monsoons have been plentiful.

Of late, there have been plenty of discussions around the topic of sanitation, which have focussed on building toilets on a massive scale. These are in the aftermath of the new and recently released Millennium Development Goals Report 2014 by the United Nations that shows that India has the world's largest population that defecates out in the open, with it being as high as 66% in rural India [1

• The news earlier in the week still reports of flood fury in different parts of North India such as Haryana, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Hyderabad, Delhi, Agra. However, in the later part of the week, the flood situation seems to be easing in most parts of the North such as Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttaranchal except in Uttar Pradesh, especially western, where the situation still continues to be grim.