Research Papers

The author looks at three ancient Kannada and Sanskrit texts - Lokoparam, Manasollasa, Shivatattvaratnakara. All these texts were written between the 12th and 18th century. These texts record hydrological data ranging from cloud formation to traditional methods of preserving potable water.

The authors study three tanks; one each in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala and find that almost all tanks in Southern India face similar problems that include farmers in command area being deprived of water, siltation, lack of proper maintenance of such structures, lack of political will to decentralise authority to tank institutions etc.

Th paper begins with a brief history of the region of Southern Kanada, its geography and the religious practices of the region. Some of the key features of this region includes  an abundance of rivers though they mostly are rain-fed. 

This paper explores Surangas, which are an ancient water system based on tunnels bored horizontally on the slopes of hills to get drinking water. These structures are mainly found in the laterite soils of Dakshina Kannada region and some parts of Kerala and Goa.

This paper presents the status of lakes in Mysore. It gives emphasis to the Socio-Economic Natural Complex - Lake Ecosystems (SENCLE) model of lake preservation and management which includes socio-technical aspects of lake care.

This paper uses secondary data to showcase the water bodies that were built in the Vijayanagar Empire. The author states that there were 88 such water bodies and these were used for irrigation purposes and also for consumption.

The author gives a brief history of tank irrigation in South India. The number of irrigation tanks in India were 208,000, of which 120,000 were in the three Southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. These tanks irrigated 1.8 million hectares. The author uses graphs to point out to the decline in tank irrigation.

A civil society consultation was held on “Regenerating natural resources and rural livelihoods in rainfed areas of India” by WASSAN at Hyderabad in December 2010 to discuss priorities for the twelfth five year plan. The Planning Commission, Government of India has been steering the process of development in India by conceptualizing five year plans and had sought inputs from civil society organizations, activists groups, networks of CBOs / NGOs, donors and others for preparing an approach paper for twelfth plan.

The objective of the consultation workshop was to contribute to the process of defining broad contours of twelfth plan with a focus on rural livelihoods the thrust area being policy framework, funding support, institutional arrangements etc., by -

• Consolidating the lessons from good practices in promoting and protecting rural livelihoods in the country, that could be integrated in twelfth five year plan.
• Systematically articulating issues and concerns (bottlenecks) in promoting and protecting rural livelihoods, which could be addressed in the twelfth five year plan.

 .  In-situ bioremediation is an attractive alternative for this purpose. To achieve this objective, bacterial strains were isolated and enriched from the contaminated site of Tamil Nadu Chromates and Chemicals Limited (TCCL) premises, Ranipet, Tamil Nadu, India.

It also attempted to examine how policy interventions threatened this knowledge base and the sustainable practices it supported.