Research Papers

The general objectives of the assessments were:

A total of 1800 children  from all the nine blocks of Kanyakumari district from 6th to 10th standard were examined using type III examination. Dental fluorosis was present 15.8% of the study population and varied from as low as 1.4% to as high as 29.4% in different areas. There was a significant difference in dental fluorosis levels between rural and urban residents.

The paper informs that a number of epidemiological studies on the benefits of water and sanitation interventions have shown that diarrhoea can be reduced by 30–50%.

Study area

This study is carried out in micro-watershed No.19, which comprises six villages in Jhadol tehsil of Udaipur district in Rajasthan. A minor irrigation project completed in 1980 serves these six villages

Rainfall, storage levels in reservoir and groundwater use

This paper published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives reviews the current state of the science relevant to the 2009 Joint Indo–U.S. Workshop on Climate Change and Health that was held in Goa, India, and, then discusses the observed relationships between climate variability and human health specifically in relation to the Indian subcontinent, highlighting future research directions.

The paper briefly summarises relevant literature on the impacts of climate change in India and touches upon the opportunities and significant challenges associated with designing, initiating, and conducting research, as well as pursuing related public health programming to improve public health infrastructure in the face of climate change. The paper argues that such research is needed to pave the way for unique and pioneering solutions that can improve public health in the face of increasing climate variability.

The paper dwells on the likely changes that climate change is expected to bring in temperature, precipitation and extreme rainfall, drought, river and inland flooding, storms/storm surges/coastal flooding, sea-level rise and environmental health risks, and who within urban populations will be at risk.

This has been a generic first attempt that can be fine-tuned and customised for each type of ecosystem and each kind of service value. Ecosystem services are defined by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment as ‘the benefits people obtain from ecosystems'.

Mountains occupy 24% of the global land surface area and are home to 12% of the world’s population. Mountains have an ecological, aesthetic, and socioeconomic significance, not only for those living in the mountain areas, but also for people living beyond them. However, the importance of ecosystem services arising from mountains is not properly recognised. The HKH region is endowed with a rich variety of gene pools and species, and ecosystems of global importance. It is a storehouse of biological diversity and a priority region in many global conservation agendas. The region has many unique ecosystems that play a critical role in protecting the environment and in providing livelihoods for much of Asia and beyond.

The Hindu Kush-Himalayan region has had very few resources to develop a detail scientific understanding needed to assess climatological, environmental, and other data in the past and there is very little information upon which a baseline for comparison with the present can be formed and future impacts can be anticipated.

It includes the present and planned water utilisation across sectors and uses, within a framework of environment, conservation and sustainability. It also examined the present institutional arrangements for water resources management and assessed the requirements for institutional development, improvement in data collection and analysis, catchment and agriculture planning, and other reforms required to ensure sustainable water resources management.

It also deals with the threat to the biodiversity in the area due to climate changes and argues for the need to devise adaptation strategies at an urgent level to preserve the unique genetic variability of the region and the indigenous knowledge of farming practices in the area.