Political

Two useful documents from Water Aid (www.wateraid.org) released on the occasion of World Toilet Day.

Third Sector Partners (www.thirdsectorpartners.com) has been retained by a large and reputed international organization working on issues related to water, sanitation and hygiene, to recruit a Program Director for its India program. The charity's mission is to ensure provision of safe and effective water and sanitation for poor and marginalized communities.

Due to the heat from the Sun the water in the rivers, lakes and Oceans becomes water vapour. As this hot moist air rises into the sky the temperature gets reduced at 7oC per km height in the sky.

C.P. Kumar of the National Institute of Hydrology, Roorkee provides a list of web communities on hydrology:

The recent issue of their newsletter is now available at their website: http://www.water.org/waterpartners.aspx?pgID=909 It contains information of partner NGOs success stories, case studies and water and sanitation issues.

Waterscapes: Cultural Politics of a Natural Resource edited by Amita Baviskar

There isn't a lot of humour we have come across so far, in the water sector. Here is something though, from WASSAN (www.wassan.org) WASSAN has a set of cartoons on their site, based on their watershed project experiences.

(Image taken from the NASA page mentioned below) Several African basins, such as the Congo, Zambezi and Nile, show significant drying over the past five years. In the United States, the Mississippi and Colorado River basins show water storage increases during that time.

www.allaboutwater.org is an interesting site for laypersons but also to an extent for water resources researchers, covering a wide range of facts relating water vis-à-vis our planet and the human race and presenting its information in a clear, user-friendly way.

Following an 18-year legal battle, a great California river once given up for dead is on the verge of a comeback. For more on this inspirational example of river restoration through civil society efforts, see the Natural Resources Defense Council site. The example may be from America, but the inspiration is universal.