Interviews

An engineer or an ecologist talking about water may not cause many heads to turn, but when they do it through poetry, there is a chance that more people will take notice.

With over 620 million defecating in the open in India, do we need a new approach to curb this practice? The force of habit is such that even households with toilets have around forty percent of adults defecating in the open. But, does curbing open defecation necessarily lead to significant improvements in child health outcomes like diarrhoea, anaemia, parasite infection and growth?

Between May and December 2014, 17 deaths were registered in Sambalpur due to jaundice but residents say that the death toll due to water-borne diseases is much more than that. In January 2015, the Odisha High Court issued a notice to the state government asking it to furnish details on the steps taken to check the Jaundice outbreak in Sambalpur. 

What is Jaundice?

For as long as local records exist, the countryside of  South Bihar has witnessed a lone man striding across the fields night and day. In the past, he was accompanied by a lantern and a lathi. Today, his companions are a bicycle and a mobile phone. He is the Bandhwe, a man charged with overseeing the irrigation channels of the area.

Muneswar and more than 170 farmers in Ambikapur, Chhattisgarh have no regrets after shifting over from traditional agricultural methods of farming to the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) method. Why would they? Most of them have been overwhelmed by the kind of returns they have got compared to their investments.

“The Dalits of this country get access to water on the goodwill of the dominant caste. Water to untouchables is still miles away,” says Goldy M George, a Dalit activist and an expert on Dalit rights.

"The Kelo river has never been like this but in the last two decades, the economic growth in the region has spoiled the purity of the river", says eminent journalist  Shiv Rajpoot from Raigarh, who is also known as "Kelo man". He has twice traveled by foot, the 90 km stretch of the Kelo from its origin to its end.

The objectives of his two visits were to study and document:

A consortium of the seven Indian Institutes of Technology has been formed and charged with the preparation of a basin-wide management plan to restore the Ganga. What have they proposed for the river?

In an exclusive interview with the India Water Portal, Dr. Tare explained the IIT consortium's vision for the Ganga and the steps that they are taking to achieve it.

Recent news has been flooded with reports of the severe drought situation in the Marathwada and Vidarbha regions of Maharashtra. Even more shocking are the reports of large-scale suicides by farmers due to crop losses.

More than three months ago, the Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) had constituted a High Level Committee, chaired by TSR Subramanian, former Cabinet Secretary, to review the key environment laws, viz. Environment (Protection) Act, Wildlife (Protection) Act, Forest (Conservation) Act, and Water and Air Pollution Prevention and Control Act.