South Deccan Plateau

Cyclone Tauktae hit the west coast, while Yaas batters the east coast

Hanumanthappa Ramanagar from Kushtagi taluka of Karnataka’s Koppal district has 15 acres of arid land with two deep wells on two sides of the land. One is a “very old” dug well and the other, a tubewell, is just 10 years old. Both were on the verge of going defunct two years ago. “There were many areas of land around us which were facing a similar fate.

Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Goa, all located in the west of India, have rivers belonging to several different basins. With the exception of rivers in Rajasthan that drain into the Yamuna basin, the other rivers in these states either drain into the Bay of Bengal via the peninsular basins or run from the Western Ghats and into the Arabian sea.

A group of Indian, Chinese, and Canadian scientists has developed transgenic rice that gives high yield even under severe water deficit. The new rice variety has been developed by transferring a gene from a common plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, into a variety of Indian rice called samba mahsuri.

Kokapet, one of the study villages for the project ‘Ensuring Water Security in Metropolitan Hyderabad’, was the first village that we visited for field work. Even though we refer to them as ‘villages’, there was very little that we found village-like here.

An impromptu weekend plan landed me in Wonderla Amusement Park in Hyderabad. My fear of heights made me go only on those rides that seemed slower and lower. These happened to be the water rides, as they were my safest bet.

Southern India reels under drought-like conditions

Lakes spewing foam and catching fire in Bangalore made big news for several weeks but this is just an indication of the times to come as we fill up water bodies with effluents or turn them into sewage dumps in most cities across India. India Water Portal talks to Leo F. Saldanha of Bangalore-based Environment Support Group on how to manage these precious resources. 

Chitradurga district in Karnataka receives the lowest rainfall in the state. According to the Drought Monitoring Board, most borewells are dry and where there is water, its quality is poor. According to Chitradurga-based Devaraja Reddy who is a hydrogeologist,150-200 borewells were drilled in 2013, with an unfortunate success rate of 2%.

Chitradurga district in southern Karnataka is infamous for drought. People here constantly suffer from water shortage and in the last few years, the problem has escalated due to poor rainfall.