Amita Bhaduri

River Mahakali snakes its way through the hills and valleys of Nepal and Uttaranchal, collecting its water from the numerous streams it receives on the way. Also known as Sharda in India, the river forms the international boundary between India and Nepal.

This year’s budget was expected to be extensively farmer- and rural-sector oriented. And that is exactly what it turned out to be. The distress in the agrarian sector has intensified and its political implications were rife this year considering the Lok Sabha elections are scheduled next year.

Amar Singh sits in his huge courtyard at the centre of his home in the village of Atraula in Meerut. Lying in the far west part of Uttar Pradesh, this is a flourishing sugarcane belt. An important agricultural region, its demographic, economic and cultural patterns are similar to that of nearby Haryana and Rajasthan.

The scenic sublimity of the Meenachil river is immortalised by Arundhati Roy in her Booker prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things. Roy skilfully presents the river flowing through the Aymanam village as a victim of human greed and callousness. The river is described in the book as a beautiful one that turns an ugly waste dump into which anything could be flung.

The fields are silvery white with raw salt crusts in the vicinity of Nawa, a small town on the northwestern banks of Sambhar lake, India’s largest inland lake. Nawa lies about 90 kilometres east of Jaipur. Also an extensive saline wetland and a Ramsar site, the blinding white salt flats stretch as far as one can see.

A seasonal river in Pali, Rajasthan, the Bandi is nothing short of a sewer. The textile town has witnessed rampant industrial growth, raw sewage discharges and toxic contamination of its waters. The river, which is devoid of lean season flow, is polluted up to 55 km downstream. The river water is unfit for drinking as well as irrigation.

In her mid-30s, Lino Lameko works as an assistant at the office of the national women’s council in Funafuti, the capital of Tuvalu. She has come all the way from the Polynesian island nation located in the Pacific Ocean to Tilonia, a small village located in Ajmer in Rajasthan to become a “barefoot solar engineer”.

Urmila Devi lives in Chaitabazaar village which is barely five kilometres from the eastern bank of the Burhi Gandak river. It is located in a particularly flood-prone area of East Champaran in north Bihar. The drinking water quality in this area is poor. The recurrent floods only make it worse.

Solawata, a small village in Jaipur district is barely 10 kilometers away from Sambhar, India's largest saline lake which is a major centre of salt production that produces about two lakh tonnes of salt a year. On our way to the village from Sambhar, we see caravans packed with bright coloured camel saddles parked on the road.

Here’s some news for nature lovers. A dirty drain in Delhi could well be on its way to becoming a bird sanctuary. The Najafgarh drain or nallah that flows through the northwest part of Gurugram is becoming a new habitat for the strikingly tall Greater flamingos, a rosy-white pink billed migratory bird as it passes through southwest Delhi.