Contamination, Pollution and Quality

Invitation

Proposals for workshop paper and poster presentations for the World Water Week are welcome from experts and actors in different disciplines. The deadline for abstract submittal is February 15, 2010 . Abstracts are welcome on the specific workshop themes listed below and described on pages 10-13.

Workshop Themes:

• Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control
• Shortcutting Historical Pollution Trends
• Water Quality for Human Health
• Improved Water Use Efficiency through Recycling and Reuse
• Management of Groundwater Abstraction and Pollution
• Minimising Land Use Based Pollution
• Resilience, Uncertainty and Tipping Points
• Origins, Pathways and Accumulation of Pollutants –

This report describes the proceedings of a workshop organised on the 5th of August 2009 at New Delhi, by the Freshwater Action Network South Asia (FANSA), the Forum for Policy Dialogue and Water Conflicts in India (FORUM), India WASH Forum and WaterAid.

The crisis of providing safe and affordable drinking water, as well as meeting the water requirements for livelihoods and infrastructure for rural and urban sanitation in India, is becoming acute by the day. In this context, ensuring the right of citizens to drinking water and sanitation, can be an important policy initiative to help improve the overall situation.

Organizer: Austrian Chemical Society GOCH

Venue: Graz -World Heritage Site

Filtech 2011 March 22. – 24. 2011, Wiesbaden, Germany

Ashok Jaitly, Water Resources Department, TERI
Policy issues in water conservation

Habil Attarwala, Furaat Earth Ltd., Gujarat

One of the most grippping and intensly scientific presentation at WHSC has been this one, by Prof. P.S. Datta of the Nuclear Research Laboratory, IARI. Groundwater can be studied in its entirety by profiling the isotopes of water.

This case study published in Yojana documents Megh Pyne Abhiyan's work in organising access to safe drinking water for rural communities during the 2006 and 2007 floods in North Bihar. As a result of the Abhiyan's work, approximately 13000 and 36000 people accepted and accessed rainwater as a safe drinking water during the North Bihar floods of 2006 and 2007 respectively. Using rain water for drinking led to significant improvement in health indicators and flood-related deaths and sickness, as well as reduction in health expenditure.

Symposium details in brief :

Aim: To discuss findings about all recent trace organic pollutants in the environment, its source, effects, and  control stragies.  Bioremediation of sites polluted with organic pollutants will also be emphasized.

Water harvesting and conservation work was taken up through building check dams, rooftop rainwater harvesting, building percolation and drinking water wells, deepening of ponds, micro-irrigation, cropping pattern interventions and more.