Information, Education and Communication Campaigns

Desilting is becoming a major component of any Lake Conservation Project now a days. The basic reasons given for necessity of desilting are - increasing the storage capacity and checking eutrophic conditions.

As it is not practicable to reverse the slow process of silting in the bed of lakes through which only silt can be removed, there is no word like 'desilting' in any standard English dictionary. What we are doing in the name of 'desilting' is practically 'digging' or 'excavation' of lake bed. By so called desilting, the original lake bed is disturbed which has far reaching adverse effects on the performance of the lake. Most visible effect is the increase in percolation rate resulting in heavy seepage losses through the lake bed as observed after massive desilting at Pushkar lake in 2009.

The Greenpeace have undertaken a lot of commendable work in the field of climate change. This link takes you through their climate change campaigns involving the masses.

The Right To Food Coalition website has many resources on NREGA and includes:

The objectives of National Water Awareness Campaign, (Rashtriya Jal Chetna Yatra) include creating awareness about the conservation of water, and to strive for the society's right to water. The campaign used innovative methods to create awareness in different states of India.

A book by Communication for Development and Learning, Bangalore about the traditional rainwater harvesting structures that have been in use in Karnataka.

TSC and Ecosan's initiative to bring about sustainable sanitation in India based on technologically advanced and eco friendly approaches towards sanitation, involving NGO, Community and Individual participation. Read more

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.

This report by the Panchayati Raj and Rural Development Department, Government of Andhra Pradesh,  provides information on Neeru Meeru, a water conservation and poverty alleviation inititaive undertaken by the governemnt of  Andhra Pradesh.

Image and Content Courtesy:Resources For Diarrheal Disease Control

PATH & the US Coalition for Child Survival have issued a Call to Action on Diarrheal Disease. The same is quoted below. "Over the last three decades, the global community has shown that it has the tools to dramatically reduce childhood death and illness from preventable and treatable diseases, such as diarrhea. During that time, for example, millions of children's lives have been saved by protecting them against diarrheal disease and its consequences through proven and affordable solutions. Yet diarrheal disease still unnecessarily takes the lives of more than 4,000 children daily, despite the fact that we hold in our hands more cost-effective and proven solutions for preventing and treating diarrhea than any other childhood illness. By increased and effective allocation of resources in a portfolio of improved treatment, nutrition, and water and sanitation interventions, we can help ensure that this common disease is no longer a leading killer of children in low-income countries.

Agropedia is a comprehensive, seamlessly integrated model of digital content organization in the agricultural domain. It aims to bring together a community of practice through an ICT mediated knowledge creating and organising platform with an effort to leverage the existing agricultural extension system. Agropedia is envisioned to be a one stop shop for all kinds of information related to Indian agriculture. The practice of crop knowledge models has been defined and developed for the first time worldwide to create architecture for accumulating known codified and approved information about crops, with the support of Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Rome. These KMs are the structural representation of knowledge by using symbols to represent pieces of knowledge and relationships between them, which can be used to connect seamlessly to the knowledge base in agropedia using semantic tools. KMs have been represented using Concept Map (C-Map) Tools .