Conservation - Reducing Water Usage

This working paper by the Challenge Program for Water and Food explores the intersection between water management, climate change, and adaptation in the Ganges River system, a basin vital to the security, economy, and environment of South Asia. 

Recognizing that an understanding of both the science and the policy of water management, climate change, and adaptation is rapidly evolving, it is not the intention of the paper to encompass all the issues related to these broad fields, but rather to provide a starting framework from which to further develop research questions and priorities for work in water and adaptation.

The paper by the Challenge Programme on Water and Food (CPWF) - Basin Focal Project provides a brief situation analysis related to water, agriculture & poverty, water resources, water productivity, institutional aspects and opportunities & risks related to the development of the Indo-Gangetic basin (IGB). Management of IGB water resources presents some formidable challenges and, therefore, steps must be taken towards integrated management of the IGB’s water and land resources in order to ensure the future sustainability of all production and ecosystems in the basin. 

Midnight, August 6, 2010: "Link, wake up!  Water is coming in from the roof!"  My mother and I were in Leh, Ladakh, staying at "Eco-Homestay," the house of Mr. Sonam Gyatso and family, in Lower Sankar.  The house was made in a hybrid of traditional and modern construction techniques: the main hall in the house was concrete, while rooms surrounding it were made of sun-dried mud bricks, and roofed with Poplar beams, a mesh of willow branches, and a thick pad of fine clay-like mud.  The house incorporated passive solar building techniques, such as a direct-gain room, and a Trombe wall, and had solar-powered lighting.  It had been raining since evening, and by midnight the clay roof was saturated and began to leak.  

We were in Leh for the express purpose of meeting with Helena Norberg-Hodge, the founder of the International Society for Ecology and Culture, co-founder of the International Forum on Globalization, founder of the Ladakh Ecological Development Group, and founder of the Women's Alliance, Ladakh.  We had learned of her online, seeing an article of hers in CounterCurrents.org, and watching her video "Ancient Futures."  She is the only person who has critically witnessed the "development" of Ladakh, from complete self-sufficiency in an exceedingly fragile eco-system, to the disaster under which it writhes today.  She has seen how "development" pulls people into a money economy, increases the distance between production and consumption,  brings reliance on fossil fuels (especially apparent in Leh where fuel and commodities are trucked in over a hazardous two-day journey from lower altitudes), results in urbanization and rural-urban migration, and brings psychological impoverishment to the people it is inflicted upon.  For 35 years, she has been working to bring safe, stable, and ecologically sound development to the region through her organizations.  Her work today, no longer limited to Ladakh, is focussed on spreading economic literacy among people throughout the planet, educating about the deeper impacts of globalization and today's consumer mono-culture.  Garnered from her years of observation and research, she has an important message for humanity today, which is what prompted us to go and meet her.

The paper by the Institute for Social and Economic Change documents the case of Ward No. 39 situated at the outskirts of the Bangalore city to understand the emerging groundwater crisis due to overdraft in urban areas. Bangalore has no perennial river, which resulted in the growth of many lakes, acting as a source of groundwater recharge earlier.

The study analyses the changes in farming system and socio-economic impacts at the household level through “before-and-after” (longitudinal) comparison of adopters an

Our publication is coming up with the annual "Case Study Special Issue” in Sept. 2010. Its a collector’s issue, where we are covering leading industries across the globe.

This report by the National Commission for Women looks at social conflict and tension that arise due to water crises and analyses the impact of these on women. The stress on water resources is a result of rapidly rising population and changing lifestyles, which have increased the need for fresh water. Intense competition among water users from agriculture, industry and domestic sector is pushing the ground water table deeper. Women bear the burden of fetching drinking water in rural areas and if opportunity costs are taken into account, it would translate to about 150 million women days each year. This amounts to a loss of a whopping 10 billion rupees per year to the national exchequer.

My house is about 20 years old and is located in R T Nagar in Bangalore. In 1990, I had got a borewell dug. The Borewell is about 150 feet deep and has been giving me excellent quality water until about 2 years ago when I started noticing muddy water. The water that is pumped to an overhead tank contains fine particles of mud which tends to settle down in the overhead tank.

The report deals with water conservation measures in the arid and semi arid area of the hard rock region viz Somadevarahalli watershed (Bijapur taluka) and Herehalla watershed (Hangund taluka) of the Bijapur district of Karnataka. Soil and water, the most valuable natural resources for farming, are not preserved in-situ and conserved for future use owing to the inadequacies and ineffectiveness of the existing structures and measures. In view of this, to assess the overall situation of water resources for the development and management of watersheds, the annual and monthly rainfall and its distribution over the study area, and the status of groundwater occurrence has been analyzed.

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