Rivers

This map shows the regions in the country that are regularly affected by floods.

The major flood prone regions are Punjab, Haryana, most of the Gangetic plains including Uttar Pradesh, North Bihar and West Bengal, the Brahmaputra valley, coastal Andhra Pradesh and Orissa, and South Gujarat.

Watersheds are natural hydrological entities that cover a specific aerial expanse of land surface from which the rainfall runoff flows to a defined drain, channel, stream or river at any particular point. The terms region, basin, catchment, watershed etc are widely used to denote hydrological units.

The Water Resources Department of Karnataka has a lot of relevant information on the river systems in Karnataka, irrigation, water resource development projects in Karnataka, notifications and orders, performance budgeting and allocation.

A study published in the The Internet Journal of Third World Medicine of bacteriological quality of water samples of a tertiary care medical center campus in North Western Himalayan region, more specifically in Kangra district of Himachal Prad

Baitarani River Basin Project is a civil society initiative to proactively explore options for futuristic resources management in this river basin. It also attempts to blend concerns for environment with livelihood, goals of local with global development, issues of rights with market and focus of sustainability with equity.

The chapter on Water Resources from the Chhatisgarh State of the Environment Report, 2004 begins with a discussion of the problems in the State like (a) limited irrigation potential created (b) unbalanced irrigable land to cultivable land ratio in districts (c) low budget for maintenance of created irrigation facilities and (d) over-dependence on paddy cultivation.

The Andhra Pradesh State of the Environment Report is available at the Environmental Information System (ENVIS) cell of the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) here. 

The case study of the irrigation infrastructure of Tungabhadra river zooms in on the river, to examine the various schemes on it. Taking the particular case of the Tungabhadra in the Krishna river basin and following the river flow as it is subject to various schemes in time and space, it shows how simmering tensions are likely to manifest as full-fledged conflicts. 

This paper on Bundelkhand from their Water and Sanitation Perspective series of WaterAid presents how ecological degradation and faulty policies make drinking water scarce and less accessible.

This deals with the proceedings of the first stakeholder meeting held under the STRIVER project for the Tungabhadra River Basin. The meeting involved representatives from different stakeholder groups like the Irrigation Departments and Command Area Development Agencies (CADAs), Forest Department, Pollution Control Board, Fisheries Department, NGOs and civil society groups from the Tungabhadra basin, representatives of Water User Associations and farmers. Only the representation from industries was lacking in this meeting.