Political

A sharing workshop on groundwater organised by ACWADAM (Advanced Center for Water Development and Management) in Pune on 21/22nd May 2009 saw some very good presentations being made. Dr Tushaar's Shah's keynote speech provided an amazing big picture of groundwater use in agriculture. The presentation can be viewed on slideshare and the entire speech is available on YouTube in 4 parts.

This paper is written by Vinod Tare, Purnendu Bose and Santosh Gupta of IIT Kanpur to examine the need for an alternative implementation and assessment methodology of River Action Plans in India. The paper illustrates of ‘Ganga Action Plan' (GAP) and its implementation near Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, to assess the methodology.

The research study was published in Down to Earth in March 2009 issue. The study describes how climate change is leading to a rising trend of short but intense spells of rainfall, which is making usable water scarce in India.

"Work in progress", is an article by Jean Dreze and Christian Oldiges, that appeared in the Feb. 14-27, 2009 issue of the Frontline Magazine, that compares the data from the NREGA website (www.nrega.nic.in) related to the first two years (2006-07 and 2007-08) of implementation of the NREGA.

Guest Post by: Lenneke Knoop, The Water Channel Image and Content Courtesy: The Water Channel The new version of www.thewaterchannel.tv has been launched. TheWaterChannel is a dedicated web-based video channel on water. It wants to be a main repository for video material on water and a main support and medium in promoting better water management.

TheWaterChannel now contains over 150 water related videos with new material coming in daily. The new version has several improved features and much more functions including improved uploading services, several technical improvements and news feed subscription.

Guest post on the Portal by Sunderrajan Krishnan, CAREWATER, (Center for Action, Research and Education on Water), www.carewater.org . === As a response to water stress in hard rock areas of the country, the Government of India has designed the Artificial Programme on Dug Well Recharge aimed at rejuvenating hard rock aquifers across the country. The idea is to divert rainfall runoff into open wells as a means of harvesting rainfall runoff and increasing recharge into aquifers. Currently as of April 2009, the program is underway in a couple of states, mainly in Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, and other states are following suit. The program is ambitious in the sense that it aims to bring in millions of dug well owning farmers towards recharging. How will such a program be implemented, monitored and channeled so that the results are achieved to satisfaction? CAREWATER has designed a network of partners and is conducting studies to understand Dug well recharge and providing feedbacks to this national programme on artificial dug well recharge. Towards this purpose, since September 2008 we have created a partner base of organizations who along with our expertise are carrying out ground studies and analysis. Some of these results are available now on our website http://www.carewater.org (Please click on the link at the bottom of the homepage). We hope to keep updating this page as the program continues and wish to have more partners join our endeavor. In particular we have published a study of dug well recharge. The study is summarized below. We would like a larger discussion of the results of the study. Your comments below will be very useful to take this project forward more effectively.

This presentation by C Vishnupriya of Bharat Institute of Higher Education and Research, Chennai looks at an existing residential building with a rainwater harvesting system that is not adequately sized.

Currently the college has a daily water consumption of 17.8KL and inadequate supply. The design integrates water conserving devices such as waterless urinals and eco-san toilets with grey and black water treatment systems and rainwater harvesting.

This presentation in the design competition "Water - Safe sustainable and for all" by Arun Karthik N and Kannan G from Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai describes water harvesting scheme of IIM Kozhikode.

This presentation by Himanshu Raj and Neelam Verma of Malviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur draws upon traditional and modern c