Rajasthan

In Rajasthan Ki Rajat Boondein, Shri Anupam Mishra documents the myriad, well-organised ways in which the people of western Rajasthan have harvested and managed water over centuries, through work of the utmost dedication, painstaking detail and community-led action. These systems have survived the test of time, and are present in most villages and towns of the desert state even today.

This path-breaking work in the harsh water-scarce conditions of the desert, was completely managed by the local communities, and serves as a guide to the rest of us, in organising to face and tackle the water crisis, that we face across the world today.

Shri Anupam Mishra has worked in the field of environment and water conservation for many decades, and is currently with the Gandhi Peace Foundation New Delhi. His books on the work of people/society organising themselves, to harvest and manage water - Aaj Bhi Khare Hain Talaab and Rajasthan Ki Rajat Boondein, are considered landmark works in the field, and continue to inspire several individuals even today, to take up work on setting up and reviving such time-tested water harvesting systems.

Sujala Scheme: The Byyraju Foundation's manual for setting up a locally managed, rural drinking water plant. The Foundation's drinking water initiative covers 154 villages across five districts of Andhra Pradesh via 31 village-level treatment plants.
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Byrraju Foundation website

This report on Planning Commission site by Research and Development Initiatives presents the findings of a study that aimed at evaluating/examining the government run rural development programmes for community development implemented in the country by:

• Documenting best practices in rural planning and implementation.
• Suggesting ways and developing systems for replication of these good practices at a larger level

Read the main article: " Battle for work" by Jean Dreze and Reetika Khera.

India is gifted with heterogeneous landforms and variety of climatic conditions such as the lofty mountains, the raverine deltas, high altitude forests, peninsular plateaus, variety of geological formations endowed with temperature varying from arctic cold to equatorial hot, and rainfall from extreme aridity with a few cms (<10 cm) to pre humid with world's maxim

This talk is part of a multimedia course series developed by Arghyam for the India Water Portal. The talk is in Hindi, with some subtitles in English.

Tarun Bharat Sangh and Rajendar Singh started a massive campaign to spread awareness of traditional water harvesting structures in order to restore the water resources of arid Rajasthan. The aim was to popularize the use of such traditional structures across the country.

These two maps indicate the percentage of districts affected by fluoride, in each state of the country and also gives data of the range of fluoride concentration in drinking water in each state.

For Asia, this map indicates the probability of occurrence of excessive concentrations of fluoride in groundwater, on a scale of high-medium-low.