News and Articles

Government of Nepal has asked the Government of India to compensate its citizens badly affected by embankments and other flood control measures taken on river Gandak. Will this not lead to a flood of demands for compensation by the victims of similar problems in other river basins like the Bagmati, the Kamala and the Kosi?

23rd November 2010, New Delhi

• Seeking a moratorium on clearances for large dams in Northeast India
• Withdrawal of clearances granted to 2000 MW Lower Subansiri, 1750 MW Demwe Lower & 1500 MW Tipaimukh dams
• Future steps on hydropower projects and dams only after full, prior and informed consent of people in the region
• Protect the Brahmaputra river basin as a cultural and ecological endowment

A two day workshop was conducted on 15-16 April 2010 at Bangalore by GTZ-ASEM and supported by the Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) and the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) regarding preparation of City Sanitation Plans.

The Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) has undertaken the preparation of the City Sanitation Plans (CSPs) under the National Urban Sanitation Policy (NUSP) since the year 2008.

This report on farmers’ experiences on System of Rice Intensification (SRI) in India by ICRISAT and WWF is an effort to compile the experiences of those farmers who pioneered the SRI method in various regions. They experimented in their own way, articulating their point of view on the method. 

The SRI is a national phenomenon in India and rice-cultivating farmers, particularly those who have less than one hectare of land, have experimented, refined, adopted and are promoting SRI. It is their hard work and trust that has spread this unknown method into all rice-growing states. Out of 564 rice-growing districts in India, SRI is being practiced by the farmers in about 216 districts.

I would like to share about Mr. Veerabhadrappa and his wife Ms. Sumangalamma who are doing number of experiments in agriculture in 80 acres of their land located in Bijekere village, Molakalmur Taluk, Chitradurga, district of Karnataka state. The farm is located 120 kms from Anantapur and 65 kms from Bellary, on the Bellary – Bangalore High way and just 30 kms from our field office at Rayadurg.

A study is now circulating about how more people in India have access to cell phones than latrines. This lit up the blogosphere and Twitter – sector professionals and advocates are both dumbfounded and outraged that something so central to health and development as a toilet is being numerically lapped by something so trivial/consumerist as a cell phone. This affront has led to yet further calls for "action": more money for toilets and greater commitments to sanitation provision from aid agencies, governments, and NGOs who too often prioritize water over sanitation.

Article and Image Courtesy: Ground Report

Many in India, perhaps, are not able to foresee how lack of governance, virtually, in every sphere is going to hit them in not too distant future. Take for instance mining. Illegal mining of mineral resources, with generous help of political and bureaucratic big wigs, is so rampant that not only are the country’s precious natural resources being purloined in a big way, its forests are being clean-felled, land degraded and its rivers threatened with extinction.

This document, an outcome of the joint efforts of NIH and CGWB gives a detailed outline emphasizing the gaps, focal areas of research, immediate measures to be taken up to provide arsenic safe potable water to the people in the arsenic vulnerable areas, other activities to be initiated for attaining a logical conclusion of the arsenic problem and also to develop a roadmap delineating as to how the suggested activities could be initiated, coordinated, undertaken, including framing out a budget estimate to fulfill those activities.

This report of the Working Group to advise Water Quality Assessment Authority (WQAA) on the minimum flows in the rivers outlines the principles behind environmental flow assessments, provides a description of methods that have been used to assist with such assessments, and highlights the features that will increase the chance of successful implementation of environmental flows. 

This chapter from the book 'Reclaiming Public Lives' by Transnational Institute describes the case of a small village in the state of Kerala, India, which faced an acute drinking water crisis and describes how people’s initiative, together with the involvement of the local panchayat and the support of the state government, could successfully address the issue of scarce drinking water in the village.