Droughts and Floods

The paper by the Challenge Program on Water and Food deals with the impact of climate change on water resources & glacier melt and potential adaptations in Indian agriculture. Global climatic changes will have major effects on precipitation, water availability, glacier/ice melt, and sea level rise. Climate-induced changes in hydrological conditions will affect the magnitude, frequency, and damage costs of future extreme events.

This paper deals with basin water use accounting and is a contribution to the synthesis work of the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF) Basin Focal Projects. It applies principles of water use accounts, developed in the first of the series to the Ganges river basin in South Asia. It provides a means to assess the interactions between water, food, poverty, and the environment and helps develop sound information about water availability in a basin, where it goes and how it is used.

Midnight, August 6, 2010: "Link, wake up!  Water is coming in from the roof!"  My mother and I were in Leh, Ladakh, staying at "Eco-Homestay," the house of Mr. Sonam Gyatso and family, in Lower Sankar.  The house was made in a hybrid of traditional and modern construction techniques: the main hall in the house was concrete, while rooms surrounding it were made of sun-dried mud bricks, and roofed with Poplar beams, a mesh of willow branches, and a thick pad of fine clay-like mud.  The house incorporated passive solar building techniques, such as a direct-gain room, and a Trombe wall, and had solar-powered lighting.  It had been raining since evening, and by midnight the clay roof was saturated and began to leak.  

We were in Leh for the express purpose of meeting with Helena Norberg-Hodge, the founder of the International Society for Ecology and Culture, co-founder of the International Forum on Globalization, founder of the Ladakh Ecological Development Group, and founder of the Women's Alliance, Ladakh.  We had learned of her online, seeing an article of hers in CounterCurrents.org, and watching her video "Ancient Futures."  She is the only person who has critically witnessed the "development" of Ladakh, from complete self-sufficiency in an exceedingly fragile eco-system, to the disaster under which it writhes today.  She has seen how "development" pulls people into a money economy, increases the distance between production and consumption,  brings reliance on fossil fuels (especially apparent in Leh where fuel and commodities are trucked in over a hazardous two-day journey from lower altitudes), results in urbanization and rural-urban migration, and brings psychological impoverishment to the people it is inflicted upon.  For 35 years, she has been working to bring safe, stable, and ecologically sound development to the region through her organizations.  Her work today, no longer limited to Ladakh, is focussed on spreading economic literacy among people throughout the planet, educating about the deeper impacts of globalization and today's consumer mono-culture.  Garnered from her years of observation and research, she has an important message for humanity today, which is what prompted us to go and meet her.

This paper by the Institute of Social and Economic Change (ISEC) examines the extent of groundwater dependency and quality status in four South Indian cities viz., Hubli, Dharwad, Belgaum and Kolar cities. Widespread water shortage problems have resulted in increased dependency on groundwater with tapping the resources to unsustainable levels. In Karnataka, out of 208 urban local bodies that come under Karnataka Urban Water Supply and Drainage Board, 41 depend on groundwater.

The India Water Portal is pleased to announce to its users, that a comprehensive archive of over two hundred and fifty technical research reports of the National Institute of Hydrology (NIH), Roorkee, have now been made available on the portal, and in the public domain for the first time.

"So far, we have recovered 170 bodies, 140 of whom have been identified," said an officer in Leh's police control room, adding that up to 300 people were still unaccounted for.

Aid workers also estimate that 10 to 12 villages remain inaccessible due collapsed bridges and blocked roads where landslides deposited boulders and mud up to 15 feet high (4 metres).

This document by International Rivers Network provides a background for the recent plans initiated by India, Nepal, Pakistan and Bhutan to build several hundred dams on the Himalayan mountains, which store vast amounts of water and with their high slopes and fast moving rivers, present a huge potential for generating hydropower.

India, Nepal, Pakistan and Bhutan have been facing the increasing challenges of meeting their rising elecricity and energy needs and hydropower dams in the Himalayas are being proposed as solutions to meet a considerable part of these requirements.

The document examines the various arguments that have been put forward against the building of the dams as against the proposed advantages that the dams are claimed to have for these four countries, which share common geographical, topographical and eco-climatic features but have starkly different political and economic contexts.

This initiative is an attempt to provide daily updates on Flood Situations and related events/news to water enthusiasts, professionals and citizens concerned about flood in Odisha. News and information collected from Odia news papers, English media (internet editions) and web site of Department of Water Resources, Govt of Odisha are put together at one place to provide an overview of flood in Odisha on a daily basis.

This initiative is an attempt to provide daily updates on Flood Situations and related events/news to water enthusiasts, professionals and citizens concerned about flood in Odisha. News and information collected from Odia news papers, English media (internet editions) and web site of Department of Water Resources, Govt of Odisha are put together at one place to provide an overview of flood in Odisha on a daily basis.

Floods: lessons to be learnt from the massive flooding in Surat city

A report by IIM criticises the way in which dams are managed in the country and calls for the need to apply Management Science / Operations Research techniques and information technology to improve dam management and prevention of floods

Flood fury: are we ready to face such an event?