Common Property Resources

Located 10 km from the Yavatmal city in Maharashtra, the Nilona reservoir has been the primary drinking water source for its residents since 1972. As in many other parts of the country, the 1990s saw the city growing and the population increasing. The Yavatmal residents, who had not experienced water shortage till then, started facing acute drinking water shortage.

Along the east coast of India, five massive wetlands--starting from Point Calimere (Kodiakarai) and Pulicat in Tamil Nadu, the Krishna-Godavari basin in Andhra, Chilika in Odisha and Sundarbans in West Bengal--provide the necessary moisture for monsoon winds to precipitate.

There was a time when the farmers of Yavatmal district depended completely on rainfed agriculture. That was before the introduction of Doha, a water harvesting structure by NGO Dilasa Sansthan in 2014. Farming changed drastically after that, something which Sitaram Kove, a 40-year-old farmer of Rajini village in the district, will vouch for.

In November 2011, the government of Madhya Pradesh sanctioned Rs 493 crore to 37 Urban Local Bodies (ULB) for drinking water supply projects under the Chief Minister’s Urban Drinking Water Supply Scheme (CMUWSS) along the lines of the Urban Infrastructure Development Scheme for Small and Medium Towns (UIDSSMT).

According to the data released by the Food and Agricultural Organisation’s AQUASTAT in 2010, at 250 billion m³ per year, India is one of the countries that uses groundwater the most. As high as 80 percent of its water is used for irrigation of which 65 percent is groundwater.

India should inform us about its future hydel projects: Pakistan

It may come as a surprise to many that Delhi, a bustling metropolis and home to a population of over 18.6 million, has one of the largest stretches of forests in the country bang in the middle of the city.

From its rather benign origins connoting a type of land classification, the term poromboke has transformed into something grotesque over the years. This term had been in use since the Cholas denoting stretches of land reserved for shared communal use which cannot be bought or sold.

“Can you see the alternating bands of light and shadow in the sky?” Chattar Singh asks me. When I nod in affirmation, he continues, “This is Mogh. There are clouds where the sun is setting right now. If we get a favourable wind, these clouds will reach here and we may get rain by night. In desert, people live by such clues from nature.”  

Lingaraj Jena is a worried man. At 86, he is one of the older fishermen in Berhampura village, an island on the Chilika lake in Odisha. Though he no longer goes for fishing due to old age, he is worried about the opening of new sea mouths; he knows it is not good news for the fishing communities he is a part of that depend on the Chilika for their livelihood.