Political

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS
2010 Global Development Awards and Medals Competition

The Japanese Award for Most Innovative Development Project is a competitive grant program administered by the Global Development Network (GDN) that provides an opportunity to development projects being executed in the field with the ability to scale up their work through a grant of US$ 30,000 for the first prize, and US$ 5000 for the second. Winners are also eligible to compete under Japan Social Development Fund for a grant of up to $200,000 for their work.

The report presents the hydrologic information and news available from print media and various government agencies mostly for the year 1999-2000 compiled problem-wise and basin-wise for the whole country.

Several concerns were raised during the discussions on the the manner in which the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) was being implemented, followed by identification of steps that were needed to ensure social, technical, institutional, financial and environmental sustainability of the programme.

The discussions revealed that:

• The TSC indeed led to the mainstreaming of sanitation in India. However, more emphasis was placed on hardware targets, while social mobilisation had been largely ignored. Thus, inspite of increase in the coverage of toilets, their usage and sustainability had remained low.

The study attempted to estimate the actual crop evapotranspiration from minimum weather data of Tavanur, Kerala and resulted in an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model, which makes use of average temperature data to estimate the actual evapotranspiration. The effectiveness of this model was evaluated using various statistical indices. The results of this model were compared with various existing techniques. The analysis led to the conclusion that the ANN models were performing better than all existing techniques for computing the actual evapotranspiration. However, the study was based on a single season lysimeter data and more research work may be required to reinforce this conclusion.

The study deals with identification of water quality monitoring sites on Kshipra river of Ujjain. The location of permanent sampling station is probably the most critical factor in a monitoring network which collects water quality data. If the samples collected are not representative of the water mass, the frequency of samplings as well as the mode of data interpretation and presentation become inconsequential.

The report presents the hydrologic soil classification of Dudhnai sub-basin based on regional information collected from various agencies supplemented by field and laboratory experiments on the soil samples collected from time to time. As required by various soil classification systems, soil properties together with other information have been studied and grouped into different classes as a reference base for future hydrological studies of the basin.

The report presents infiltration studies of the year 1996-97 for the Bargi Left Bank Canal Command area of Narsinghpur district of Madhya Pradesh. Infiltration studies are mainly addressed to a variety of applications for managing water resources. The design of methods for estimation of flood mitigation and erosion control is often based on estimates of peak discharge derived from prediction of infiltration rate. Water conservation procedures require computation of cumulative infiltration to produce estimates of runoff yield.      

In this report, an application of kriging technique is presented for interpolation of groundwater levels in Sagar district of Madhya Pradesh. Groundwater management is important to meet the increasing demand for domestic, agricultural and industrial use. Various management measures need to know the spatial and temporal behavior of groundwater. Most of the groundwater models require the inputs to be available on a grid pattern. However in the field, these parameters are generally measured at random points. However, interpolation of parameters at the grid nodes is a prerequisite for using this data in groundwater modeling.

The report deals with groundwater table and hydrochemistry of the Kakinada coastal aquifer in East Godavari, Andhra Pradesh.

The report presents a hydrochemical study of the groundwater of Sagar, Madhya Pradesh carried out during 1996 to examine the suitability of water for drinking and irrigation purposes. Under the study, thirty-five water samples representing the shallow groundwater of the region were collected during pre-monsoon and post-monsoon seasons in the month of June and November 1996 respectively.