Drinking and other Domestic Uses

This paper on Bundelkhand from their Water and Sanitation Perspective series of WaterAid presents how ecological degradation and faulty policies make drinking water scarce and less accessible.

This map gives a district level picture of the percentage of coverage of habitations having access to safe drinking water within the country. Safe drinking water availability reduces the risk of deaths due to diarrhoea, jaundice and other water borne diseases. In India still a very large proportion of people have no access to safe drinking water.

Arghyam has supported a Campaign for popularizing Rooftop Rainwater Harvesting (RWH) in a flood prone region in North Bihar. The second phase of the Abhiyan has been designed based on the experiences from the first phase.

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Download here: Rapid assessment report - Tilak Tajpur Panchayat

The conference was held in Bangalore on 30th June 2009 at the ITC Windsor. With cities expanding, the need for drinking water is exponentially increasing. The municipal systems are stressed to breaking limits and more and more people are turning to bottled water. And this is the case not only in urban but in rural areas as well. Today, the bottled water industry is at 1000 crores and is visualised to expand more! In this context the Confederation of Indian Industries organised a seminar on the Packaged Water Industry on 30th June, 2009 to discuss the scope of the market, the standards of quality and the methods of disposing the waste produced due to the industry. The source for most of the drinking water in our country remains ground water. This contributes to 80% of drinking water in rural areas and 50% in urban areas. However, claimed Mr. T.M. Hunse, Regional Director of the Central Ground Water Board, the excessive usage of Groundwater is the direct cause of dry wells and the depleting levels of groundwater in the country. However, the need for bottled water cannot be denied. Despite conflicts between communities and bottled water plants, many of the country’s poor are at the mercy of the municipal supplies which are erratic and unreliable, he said. Bottled water provides an alternative way to access clean and healthy water. At the same time, it absolves the government of its duty and ends up leaving farmers high and dry. He placed full responsibility on the bottled water plants to ensure people safe water (especially when the groundwater is polluted) and work towards conscientiously using the existing groundwater supply in an egalitarian manner.

Last Wednesday, this rural Australian town 100 miles south of Sydney, made history with its near-unanimous consensus to ban the sale of bottled water. At the town meeting of 350 voters, only 2 voted against the ban. This indicates an increasing awareness of the futility of the bottled water and its drain on natural resources. The landmark decision comes right after the State-wide ban in New South Wales, where State departments and agencies have been restrained from buying bottled water, calling it “a waste of money and natural resources”.

The Water Portal had previously covered ASHWAS, an ambitious water and sanitation survey in Karnataka conducted by Arghyam and partner organisations.

Time: 1:46 minutes

Watch movie here

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