Equity

It is a part of the Global Scaling Up Rural Sanitation project of the Water and Sanitation Programme, World Bank and focuses on learning how to combine the approaches of Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), behavior change communications, and social marketing of sanitation to generate sanitation demand and strengthen the supply of sanitation products and services at scale, leading to improved health for people in rural areas. This is one in a series of knowledge products designed to showcase project findings, assessments and lessons learned in the project.

Over the last few years, the concept of open-defecation free communities has emerged as one of the building blocks toward achieving total sanitation. The term ‘access’ is widely used to capture increase in sanitation usage. However, a clean environment is a public good. Hence, there was a need to achieve total sanitation at the community level to realize public health benefits. This has led policy makers and practitioners to adopt strategies that achieve community-wide total sanitation status, which includes the community becoming open-defecation free, and adopting safe hygiene and environmental sanitation practices.

It covers varying groundwater scenarios in the country including the highly developed metros, the hilly region, the coastal cities, the cities tapping unconsolidated and hard rock aquifers. The report briefly describes the administrative set up, status of water supply and demand, groundwater scenario, feasibility of rainwater harvesting and groundwater development strategy.

It is an updated version of an earlier report on “Groundwater in urban environment in India” (2000). Since then, groundwater regime, urban demography and water demand have changed enormously. This report will form a scientific base for an in-depth understanding of urban groundwater system including aquifer geometry, water level behavior and groundwater quality. The possibility of artificial recharge to rejuvenate the urban aquifers has also been discussed.

NREGA is being eulogized by many in the academic, development and policy arena as a “silver bullet” for eradicating rural poverty and unemployment, by way of generating demand for productive labour force in villages and private incentives for management of common property resources.

The practice continues in the country in spite of efforts of several people, implementation of government schemes such as the National Scheme for Liberation and Rehabilitation of Scavengers since 1992 and Self Employment Scheme

The current research analysis by International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in cooperation with ICAR Resear

Click here to read the entire article

 But as you may recall as it was reported before on this forum that his son died in need of attention when he was still struggling to get his wages.

Click here to read the entire article

India is the largest user of groundwater resources in the world. It is estimated that approximately 230 cubic kilometers per year is used annually, this is more than a quarter of the total world consumption from this resource.

It is in this context that this World Bank report looks at the reasons for this quantum of groundwater usage.

The report delves into socio-economic and political reasons and looks at policies which inadvertently promote so much extraction. The report also analyses various attempts to manage this resource. These attempts range from government and international agency efforts directed to grassroots mobilisations. Finally the report comes out with suggestions to deal with this crisis.