India

Swaraj University is a two-year learning program that creates opportunities for young learners to develop the knowledge, skills and perspectives they need to create viable green-collar enterprises and to support healthy and resilient local communities. This self-directed learning process invites learners to identify their hearts’ visions and engages them in developing the skills, relationships and practices they need to manifest those visions.

The Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR, India) in association with the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR, France), the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, Germany), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC, UK) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO, The Netherlands) invite applications for joint social science networking proposals between research centres in the participating European countries and India.

The occurrences of some exceptionally heavy rainfall during the recent years causing flash floods in many areas necessitated the study of long term changes in extreme rainfall over India.

The study includes the analysis of the frequency of rainy days, number of rainy days and heavy rainfall days as well as one-day extreme rainfall and return period analysis in order to observe the impact of climate change on extreme weather events and flood risk. It has been found that frequency of heavy rainfall events are decreasing in major parts of the central and north India while increasing in peninsular India, east and north east India.

The report provides interesting findings that are useful for hydrological planning and disaster managements such as –

It is a part of the Global Scaling Up Rural Sanitation project of the Water and Sanitation Programme, World Bank and focuses on learning how to combine the approaches of Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), behavior change communications, and social marketing of sanitation to generate sanitation demand and strengthen the supply of sanitation products and services at scale, leading to improved health for people in rural areas. This is one in a series of knowledge products designed to showcase project findings, assessments and lessons learned in the project.

Over the last few years, the concept of open-defecation free communities has emerged as one of the building blocks toward achieving total sanitation. The term ‘access’ is widely used to capture increase in sanitation usage. However, a clean environment is a public good. Hence, there was a need to achieve total sanitation at the community level to realize public health benefits. This has led policy makers and practitioners to adopt strategies that achieve community-wide total sanitation status, which includes the community becoming open-defecation free, and adopting safe hygiene and environmental sanitation practices.

The Central Pollution Control Board has invited submission of book in Hindi on the subject of Pollution Control and Environmental Policies. The idea is to encourage original writing in Hindi. The following themes have been suggested for bringing forth the writings – Water and Air Pollution, Environmental Planning and Management, Noise Pollution, Solid waste Management, Environmental Monitoring (Auditing), Environmental Law, Environmental Impact Assessment,  Biotechnology, Climate Change and Global Warming. Awards will be given for selected entries.

CSIR-National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI), established in 1958 with its headquarters at Nagpur and at present having five Zonal Laboratories across the country, is one of the constituent Institutes of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR), a premier multi-disciplinary R&D organization in India which is an autonomous body of the Department of Scientific & Industrial Research under the aegis of the Ministry of Science & Technology, Government of India.

It’s May already and the advent of one of India’s most awaited natural event the monsoon is nigh. This year according to early reports it may be in the Andaman’s by the 12th of May itself and may arrive in Kerala earlier than June 1st its usual arrival date.

While the city is getting ready cleaning up its storm-water drains and sewerage networks other measures are equally crucial. The de-silting of the various tanks in the city is a must as well as the cleaning up of the channels leading up to them. The overflow weirs and the ‘Rajakaluves’ the channels linking one tank to the other, need to be dredged and de-silted too.

You must have heard of the meteorological department’s monsoon forecast. It promises to be a near normal monsoon season from June-September with rains expected to be 98 per cent of the long period average with a 5 per cent variation. Sounds good.

 Soil respiration is a major process affecting the global carbon cycle and nutrient flux in the terrestrial ecosystem. It is the major pathway for exchange of gases from soil to atmosphere, influencing atmospheric temperature and ultimately contributing to global warming.

This report by Price Waterhouse Coopers India Limited for the Second Annual India Water Conference in April 2011 presents its view on urban water reforms for the next decade. India is still at an early stage of the urbanisation process and will witness exponential growth in many of its cities over the next few decades. By 2030 the urban population is expected to reach more than 590 million. This will put enormous pressure on all existing resources, especially water. Despite sufficient availability of raw water, many of its cities struggle to provide more than a few hours of water supply.

Improving water availability in the cities requires addressing complex policy, institutional and funding challenges. The core of the new approach will include instituting a new era of greater accountability and a performance-driven approach. Service delivery to urban poor has to be an integral part of this approach to bring about greater inclusiveness.

Recent experience with Public-Private-Partnerships (PPP) in urban water supply shows that with a customer focused approach and demonstration of clear benefits, there will be greater political and public acceptability of private participation. At the same time, fiscal framework at the local level has to be considerably strengthened before attempting wide scale replication of PPP.