Research Papers

This presentation by ACWADAM deals with climate change and its impacts on long-term replenishment of groundwater. The presentation provides an overview of the current insights and knowledge on climate change impacts and gives an overview of best options for developing and safeguarding groundwater resources.

This series by Thingnam Anjulika Samom deals with the impact of modernisation, development and state policy on the traditional use, control and management of Loktak lake, the largest common property aquatic resource in Manipur. The Loktak Hydropower Project commissioned in 1983 has damaged the ecology of the largest freshwater lake in the northeast, and has altered the culture, agricultural and livelihood patterns of communities residing around Loktak. The series looks at what this common property resource used to be and what it has become.

Loktak, the 300-square-km lake is spread over three districts in the valley – Imphal West, Bisnupur and Thoubal and covers 61% of the total identified wetlands of Manipur. Besides being the source of livelihood for hundreds of people, Loktak also houses the floating national park Keibul Lamjao, the only home in the world to the endangered Sangai deer. It is not only the geographical topography of the lake that has changed in the last few decades. The lake is also beset by increasing pollution, siltation, rapid proliferation of phumdis and the commissioning of the Loktak hydel project in the 1980s Manipur or Imphal River, with the Loktak lake forming the headwaters to provide regulated storage for power generation.

This collaborative research work between National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases (NICED), Kolkata and International Vaccine Institute (IVI), Seoul under the Diseases of the Most Impoverished (DOMI) Program, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation aims to give useful information for the prevention and control of typhoid fever and cholera. The aim is to accelerate the introduction of new generation vaccines against cholera, shigellosis, and typhoid fever, through research and capacity-building. 

This paper by National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases (NICED) is based on a prospective, community based study in an impoverished urban site in Kolkata in order to measure the burden of cholera, describe its epidemiology, and search for potential risk factors that could be addressed by public health strategies. The study population was enumerated at the beginning and end of the study period. Surveillance through five field outposts and two referral hospitals for acute, watery, non-bloody diarrhoea was conducted from May 2003 to April 2004.

This study by the Central Public Health and Environmental Engineering Organisation (CPHEEO) assesses the status of water supply, sanitation and solid waste management in selected 300 cities and towns of India including all metropolitan cities and selected Class I and Class II urban centres. It estimates the requirement of funds for full coverage of population by these services in the urban areas of the country from 1999 to 2022 (at five yearly intervals). Overall, the study confirms the normal notion that the metropolitan cities are better provided for than the other size class of urban centres.

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has recently published the 20^th Anniversary edition of its Human Development Report (HDR) which presents the latest Human Development Index (HDI). The premise of the HDI reports is simple - national development should be measured not simply by national income nor should an individual’s well-being be evaluated by money alone, as had long been the practice, but also by life expectancy and literacy. 

Income is of course crucial - without resources, any progress is difficult. Yet there is a need to gauge whether people can lead long and healthy lives, whether they have the opportunity to be educated and whether they are free to use their knowledge and talents to shape their own destinies.