India

Image and Content Courtesy: UNICEF UNICEF is looking to fill 3 roles of Water and Environmental Sanitation Officers.

The India Water Portal has several intern positions up for grabs. Positions range from film makers, visual designers to software enthusiasts, offering a chance to work at the forefront of water activism in India. FILM MAKERS Project head: Vijay Krishna Brief description of the project: We have the CDs from the Arghyam 3rd annual conference. These need to be edited and packaged into a short film. Creating Video Case Studies of Urban and Rural Schools doing Rain Water harvesting. We would highlight them on the Schools Water Portal (http://schools.indiawaterportal.org) Location of the project: Bangalore Expected time duration of the project: 1 month Duration of the internship: 1 month Preferred educational qualification: Amateur Film Makers/Students with an interest to work on social and environmental projects. Knowledge of Development Sector, and/or Environment would be an added advantage. Languages preferred: English Computers - Interns must bring their own laptops or at least have a home computer. Costs , India Water Portal will not be able to provide any financial support for interns. However any expenses for work-related travel and for consumables would be reimbursed.

Image and Content Courtesy: WaterAid

WaterAid India's WaterDrops newsletter is published quarterly. WaterDrops is an effort to showcase WaterAid India's work, ideas, issues and concerns with its partners, civil society organisations, international NGOs, UN agencies and other important players in the water and sanitation sector. The latest issue of WaterDrops focusses on issues of inclusion, including articles on Social exclusion in drinking water and sanitation, Caste based discrimination, Water as a tool for social control and Inclusive approaches in Bihar. The latest issue can be downloaded here: WaterDrops Issue - 12

Forwarded to the Portal by:Priyanka Kohli, ALC Image and Content Courtesy: ALC Access Livelihoods Consulting India Pvt. Ltd. is a development management organisation comprising a group of self motivated and passionate consultants with prime focus on enabling the promotion of Sustainable livelihoods for poor. ALC India organises as well as conducts Capacity building programmes for various organisations. ALC has published the Capacity Building programme Calendar for the financial year 2009-2010. The annual training calendar can be accessed here:ALC Annual Training Calendar

Forwarded to the Portal by: Deepa Gupta , IYCN One of the central features of JNNURM is community participation. Mandatory reform conditions such as Community Participation Law, to enable constitution of Area Sabhas within municipal wards and Public Disclosure Law are testimony to this fact. However, our experience shows community participation in various aspects of implementing JNNURM needs much greater attention than just the passage of laws for community participation. It is being increasingly realized that communities have little capacity to participate. Objective of the Fund: The primary objective of the fund is to catalyse community participation by supporting the building of community assets. In the long run, this should lead to increased community participation in the city's functioning thus enabling them to develop a sense of ownership on community assets and take on responsibilities for community-based exercises.

Guest Post by: Himanshu Thakkar, SANDRP

You may recall that following an appeal by SANDRP before the Central Information Commission, CIC had in January 2009 asked India Met Dept to review their policy and put up district wise monthly rainfall data for at least five years on its website. The relevant order of CIC can be seen here: CIC to IMD Review Info Policy and relevant Press Release from SANDRP can be seen at: CIC Directs IMD to Review Information Policy Now, IMD has put up the requested data on its website, see: http://imd.gov.in/section/hydro/distrainfall/districtrain.html IMD tells us that they are still in the process of collecting, collating the data and data of more districts would be uploaded as they are ready. We have also suggested to IMD to also provide annual figures (total of the monthly data) so that people get quick picture about the same. We also notice that links for some of the districts (e.g. Nalgonda in AP) are not working. Let us know if you have other feedback. We would like to thank all those who have also submitted their comments on the India Water Portal, supporting our position, the comments were submitted to IMD and CIC.

"Right to Water and Sanitation", is a briefing paper (draft) written in March 2009, by Indira Khurana and Richard Mahapatra of WaterAid India, based on secondary research.

These documents deal with proceedings of the discussion initiated by Gomukh Trust, Pune with support from Arghyam, Bangalore on “Maharashtra Water Resources Regulatory Authority Act” to examine it in the context of Integrated River Basin  Management and community participation.  The objectives of the conference were –

The national seminar on “Changing geohydrological scenario in the hard rock terrain in India”, was jointly organised by the Geological Society of India, Department of Mines and Geology, Central Ground Water Board, Karnataka Jal Biradari and Karnataka Institute of Cooperative Management.

The Central Ground Water Board, Ministry of Water Resources organized a “National Congress on Groundwater” in 2007 to address various issues related to better governance of groundwater as well as facilitate the sharing of information and coordination with various agencies and stakeholders engaged in the programme of groundwater development and management.