India

My cracked heels seemed to be incurable no matter how much they were  treated, until the lockdown happened! It came with a new norm - Stay home, stay safe. And it gave me my original feet back! This unexpected delight came with a realisation that my body was healing, and so was  Mother Earth, during the lockdown!

Piramal Sarvajal, the safe drinking water initiative of Piramal Foundation launched a tool named Composite Water Vulnerability Index (CWVI) at its recent webinar on ‘Sustainable water security for urban underserved’ hosted in association with Center for Water and Sanitation (CWAS) and Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT).

In October this year, locals and river activists campaigned against illegal sand mining in Yamunanagar, Haryana. The authorities were compelled to take notice and the errant firms that had deployed heavy machinery to embank the river and divert its natural flow to extract sand were booked for violation.

Policies are seen as a political investment, and the executive and legislature have electoral pressures and considerations. Civil services and other government jobs have generated interests primarily for their job security, high salaries, and promotions.

In most field programs there is a time lag between data collection and data reporting as only periodic reporting is expected. The field staff compiles it manually at the end of the period and reports up in the hierarchy. There are two types of compilation - aggregation and data filtering.

In the last few years, we have suddenly seen a spike in usage of the term software platform. All types of software applications started getting called platform. But the term platform has a specific meaning which differentiates it from technology/software applications.

There are several uncertainties with technology endeavours of non-profit organisations. They pose significant risks to non-profits - wasted resources, inability to evolve with time, and obsolescence in the long term. Open source products offer a sustainable path.

UN emphasises the need for safe faecal disposal this WTD2020

Two more wetlands added to Ramsar sites

In the early weeks of the lockdown, we, at Hindustan Unilever Foundation, had a rather humbling epiphany. We had all the data we needed on the households that we work with in our water conservation programmes: their landholding, crop choices, yields from each season, source of water, number of water conservation structures built, amount of water saved, and so on.