Information, Education and Communication Campaigns

The Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) has issued the draft CRZ Notification, 2010 under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 on 15th September, 2010 inviting suggestions and objections from public within 60 days from date of its issue. The following are the new additions to the original 1991 notification:

This study by the Central Public Health and Environmental Engineering Organisation (CPHEEO) assesses the status of water supply, sanitation and solid waste management in selected 300 cities and towns of India including all metropolitan cities and selected Class I and Class II urban centres. It estimates the requirement of funds for full coverage of population by these services in the urban areas of the country from 1999 to 2022 (at five yearly intervals). Overall, the study confirms the normal notion that the metropolitan cities are better provided for than the other size class of urban centres.

This paper from Current Science deals with anaemia in pregnancy and low birth weight babies, which can lead to maternal and infant mortality, and continues to plague India and several other countries despite nutritional counselling and maternal iron and folic acid supplementation. It reports the results of fluoride avoidance as an approach to address the issue. The methodology of the research entailed the following -

The India Water Portal is pleased to announce to its users, that the Civil Engineering courses from the multi-faceted and multi-modal open courseware of National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) have been put together in the form of a summary. These courses are being carried out by Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore as a collaborative project supported by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (Government of India) to enhance the quality of engineering education in the country, by developing curriculum based video and web courses. In these web based lectures, the authors have developed the subject in detail and in stages in a student-friendly manner.

The training manual by ICRISAT on integrated management of watersheds is meant for watershed development practitioners and provides an account of the socio-technical aspects of watershed. To begin with, the definitional aspects of watershed are spelt out -

• The term “watershed” strictly refers to the divide separating one drainage basin from another. However, over the years, the use of the term watershed to signify a drainage basin or catchment area has come to stay.
• Hydrologically, watershed could be defined as an area from which the runoff drains through a particular point in the drainage system.