India

Designate nodal agencies for restoration of water bodies: NGT to states

Climate change has been a popular buzzword for the last two decades in the international policy arena, stimulating multitude of ideas and a few action commitments at different levels of governments.

Most of the travel demand in the Indian cities is met by the non-motorized and public transport systems i.e. low carbon modes of transport. With the growing urbanization and income levels along with the degraded infrastructure to support the low carbon modes, the dependency on personal motorized vehicles will increase soon.

How have watershed development projects fared in India? Have they helped in better distribution of benefits among the poor and marginalised? Why is it important to talk about watershed development at this juncture?

This book by Dr Eshwer Kale dwells on these questions and explores issues around social exclusion among resource-poor people in watershed development projects.

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.