India

You must have heard of the meteorological department’s monsoon forecast. It promises to be a near normal monsoon season from June-September with rains expected to be 98 per cent of the long period average with a 5 per cent variation. Sounds good.

 Soil respiration is a major process affecting the global carbon cycle and nutrient flux in the terrestrial ecosystem. It is the major pathway for exchange of gases from soil to atmosphere, influencing atmospheric temperature and ultimately contributing to global warming.

This report by Price Waterhouse Coopers India Limited for the Second Annual India Water Conference in April 2011 presents its view on urban water reforms for the next decade. India is still at an early stage of the urbanisation process and will witness exponential growth in many of its cities over the next few decades. By 2030 the urban population is expected to reach more than 590 million. This will put enormous pressure on all existing resources, especially water. Despite sufficient availability of raw water, many of its cities struggle to provide more than a few hours of water supply.

Improving water availability in the cities requires addressing complex policy, institutional and funding challenges. The core of the new approach will include instituting a new era of greater accountability and a performance-driven approach. Service delivery to urban poor has to be an integral part of this approach to bring about greater inclusiveness.

Recent experience with Public-Private-Partnerships (PPP) in urban water supply shows that with a customer focused approach and demonstration of clear benefits, there will be greater political and public acceptability of private participation. At the same time, fiscal framework at the local level has to be considerably strengthened before attempting wide scale replication of PPP. 

 Due to my childhood acquaintance with paddy cultivation, I used to be curious to understand global processes and methodologies around this cultivation and to do better to help my local community benefit.

Groundwater caters to the demand of ever growing domestic, agricultural and industrial sector of the country and is being indiscriminately exploited by several users. On the other hand, rapid urbanization and land use changes has resulted in reduced natural infiltration or recharge of aquifers.

This has led to various problems related to quantity and quality and issues like the decline in water levels, depletion of groundwater resource and quality deterioration. There is thus an imperative need for augmenting the valuable groundwater resource. Artificial recharge and roof top rainwater harvesting is one such method that can revive this precious resource. Several traditional and scientifically proven artificial recharge and rainwater harvesting techniques have been adopted in different parts of the country. These structures have proven to be viable option for augmenting the groundwater aquifers by making use of surplus surface runoff.

It is a part of the peri-urban water security project discussion paper series that aims at having a collection of research papers relevant to the concepts and processes involved in the project that represent preliminary ideas circulated to encourage discussion and comments.

Though the relevant literature is cited at many places, this is not intended to be a literature review per se, but instead seeks to develop a shared framework to identify a set of common issues and questions that merit investigation.

The paper argues that peri-urban can be better understood in terms of its characteristics - a mix of agricultural and non-agricultural land uses, flows of goods, services and resources between villages and urban centers and a social profile that is very heterogeneous and in a state of flux. All these impact upon the local natural resource base, creating particular environmental and natural resource management problems that are often beyond the scope of urban or rural governments alone and require innovative ways of being addressed.

Although there is enough water in the world, it is rarely in the right place at the right time in the right quantity and quality.

 The more the water wealth of a nation the higher will be the opportunities for achieving high rates of progress in the fields of agriculture production and industrial growth that help in promoting economic wealth, employment opportunities and higher standards of living. Hence the advanced countries are constantly upgrading their water resources by harnessing not only all the ground and surface waters but also by tapping a renewable, virtually unlimited and unexploited sky water resource in the atmosphere in the form of innumerable clouds. Enlightened scientists, bureaucrats, industrialists and statesmen in about 50 countries are frequently using cloud seeding operations for over 40 years for various purposes like