West Bengal

Article courtesy: Corporate Disaster Resource Network

Assessment team:

Oxfam India – Mr. Pradeep Bharwad (Technical Assistance), Mr. Bhaswar Banerjee, Mr. Amit Sengupta
Save the Children - Mr. Abinash Lahkar, Mr. Piyush Kumar
Kajla Jana Kalyan Samity - Tapas Jana and Dipak Banerjee
Areas assessed: Moyna & Panskura Block of East Midnapore District of West Bengal

Assessment date: 24th June, 2011

This approval is for the reconstitution of the Damodar Valley Corporation with four full time members, namely, Chairman, Member (Technical), Member (Finance) and Member Secretary; and six part time members, namely – one representative from the Central Government; two representatives – one each from the Government of Jharkhand and the Government of West Bengal; three independent experts- one each from the field of irrigation, water supply and generation or transmission of electricity. The Chairman will be the Chief Executive Officer of the Corporation. The posts of Financial Adviser and Secretary will be abolished.

Organizers:

• National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD)
• ACCESS Development Service

Venue: Kolkata

NABARD has undertaken many initiatives for promoting sustainable agriculture. The Regional Offices, CBOs, PIAs have also innovated locally depending on the local requirements. However, this vast knowledge base is not always tapped for sharing and dissemination in a systematic way. Outside NABARD also there are many successful experiments, models on sustainable agriculture practices. One of the mandates of NRMC is to identify such models and facilitate their replication.

These efforts were developed and launched through urban local bodies and which transformed service levels and helped improve compliance with the Municipal Solid Waste Rules, in a context where the state of MSW services in most of the Indian towns has been far from sati

The states of Assam, Bihar, eastern U.P, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bengal, Orissa were allocated extra funds in the last year for this purpose.

 Arsenic poisoning in these districts is a serious environmental problem and is affecting the health of millions of people in the State. The problem has been aggravated with increase in groundwater exploitation leading to leaching of arsenic located in upper layers of sediment down into the deep aquifers.

During my visits to these districts, I have had dreary experiences -

Introduction

The data has been collected over a period of many years from 39 water quality monitoring stations along the main river and 102 stations on its tributaries which were setup in 2008/09.

The study focuses on the parameters for dissolved oxygen, (DO), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) and faecal coliforms (FC) as these indicate the biological health of the river. The period of study for the river Ganga is 1999-2008. The study finds that most of the water quality parameters studied do not meet the standards.

In India, at national level when all the planners are saying about the water grid, river linking project, i