Books and Book Reviews

This set of case studies is a part of a book prepared by Lokayan in collaboration with the Planning Commission titled “Seeds of Hope", covering themes of agriculture, biodiversity, education, forestry, governance, health, movements and water. The case studies related to agriculture and food security are summarised below:

This document is an educational booklet on water management, published by Utthan, which works towards empowering women's groups to seek clean and adequate quality of water for all. 

The booklet provides background information on water as an important natural resource and the importance of protecting and maintaining the quality and quantity of this natural resource.

The details have been explained in a manner that is simple and understandable and include illustrations that are self explanatory and easy to follow.

The booklet is divided into the following sections:

A Comprehensive Environmental Pollution Index (CEPI) is a very useful tool to capture the health dimensions of the environment including air, water and land. The CEPI is intended to act as an early warning tool and can help in categorising the industrial clusters/areas in terms of priority of planning needs for interventions.

This report by the Central Pollution and Control Board (CPCB) presents the results of the application of the CEPI to selected industrial clusters or areas.

The main objective of the study was to identify polluted industrial clusters or areas in order to take concerted action and to centrally monitor them at the national level. This was in order to improve the current status of environmental components such as air and water quality data, ecological damage, and visual environmental conditions.

This book is essential reading for economists, power sector officials, power generation companies and environmentalists alike.

Dr.Bharat Jhunjhumwala holds a BSc degree in physics, chemistry and mathematics. He earned his PhD in food and Resource Economics from University of Florida at a tender age of 23 years. He joined Indian institute of management, Bangalore as Assistant professor immediately thereafter. He lived in a slum for two years to understand poverty and organized the Trade Union at IIM during the Emergency. He resigned from the IIM and became a consultant to donor agencies like Swiss Development Cooperation, Oxfam, Care, Overseas Development Institute and others mainly on rural development and watershed issues. He writes a column on economic issues for about 50 newspapers in india. He lives on the banks of River Alaknanda in uttarakhand on the feet of Lord Badri Vishal.

Several concerns were raised during the discussions on the the manner in which the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) was being implemented, followed by identification of steps that were needed to ensure social, technical, institutional, financial and environmental sustainability of the programme.

The discussions revealed that:

• The TSC indeed led to the mainstreaming of sanitation in India. However, more emphasis was placed on hardware targets, while social mobilisation had been largely ignored. Thus, inspite of increase in the coverage of toilets, their usage and sustainability had remained low.