People and Organisations

A voyage in a traditional canoe or a houseboat through the picturesque Vembanad lake is enough to understand why the south Indian state of Kerala is called the “God’s own country’. 

It was in the late 90s that Raigarh emerged as the hub for power, coal mining and sponge iron in Chhattisgarh. The coalfield in Mand Raigarh is spread over an area of more than 1,12,000 hectares with an estimated 21,117 metric tonnes of coal. 

Water is the most precious natural resource available to mankind. We can survive without food for days, but not without water. The availability of fresh water has been taken for granted for centuries. The world’s population has grown from 1.7 billion to 7.5 billion in the last 100 years.

This story is of Punawli Kalan village in Uttar Pradesh, where a community with the support of a women-led federation, solved its water woes by developing a community-owned water supply system.

Located 10 km from the Yavatmal city in Maharashtra, the Nilona reservoir has been the primary drinking water source for its residents since 1972. As in many other parts of the country, the 1990s saw the city growing and the population increasing. The Yavatmal residents, who had not experienced water shortage till then, started facing acute drinking water shortage.

There was a time when the farmers of Yavatmal district depended completely on rainfed agriculture. That was before the introduction of Doha, a water harvesting structure by NGO Dilasa Sansthan in 2014. Farming changed drastically after that, something which Sitaram Kove, a 40-year-old farmer of Rajini village in the district, will vouch for.

In November 2011, the government of Madhya Pradesh sanctioned Rs 493 crore to 37 Urban Local Bodies (ULB) for drinking water supply projects under the Chief Minister’s Urban Drinking Water Supply Scheme (CMUWSS) along the lines of the Urban Infrastructure Development Scheme for Small and Medium Towns (UIDSSMT).

In the last few decades, India has seen an increasing number of people migrating from rural areas to urban cities in search of work and better living. These migrants often get employed in the informal sector as construction workers, vendors, domestic servants, etc. They also live in informal settlements, generally known as slums.

The year 2016 was an abysmal year in terms of environmental policy and conservation in India.

“Can you see the alternating bands of light and shadow in the sky?” Chattar Singh asks me. When I nod in affirmation, he continues, “This is Mogh. There are clouds where the sun is setting right now. If we get a favourable wind, these clouds will reach here and we may get rain by night. In desert, people live by such clues from nature.”