Governance

The Madurai Symposium organised by the

The Data Finder aims to bring together all water data from all over the web and put them in one convenient searchable tool so you can use it for any projects you are working on.

This report by the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP), The World Bank analyses primary and secondary data from the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) of the Government of India, which has been in operation for over a decade (1999 to date).

The audience for this report includes policy-makers and implementers at national, state and district levels, and the broader sanitation and hygiene community. The report aims at gaining an understanding of the processes, outputs and outcomes of the campaign at a national level and across the states as compared with the inputs that have gone into the program.

The report draws on these indicators, which are then compared individually and in combination to benchmark the states, to understand the relative performance of the states. This benchmarking, based on a combination of eight indicators, is undertaken for both states and districts across the country.

This report by the Task Force, constituted by the Planning Commission, Government of India in April, 2008, is an outcome of the need expressed by the Prime Minister of India for a fresh analysis of the problems of the hill states and hill areas of the country in a manner that suggests that these areas do not suffer in any way on account of their peculiarities.

Opinions have been expressed that the pace of development of the Indian Himalayan Region (IHR) has been slow when compared to the rest of the country. At the same time, its fragile nature and difficulty of taking up conventional development initiatives has not been appreciated. In this report, arguments have been presented recommending reshaping of policies to bring in the “mountain perspective” for the IHR, in the national planning. Emphasis has also been laid on developing norms for good governance and for harnessing social capital at the grassroots.

This draft report on the study of lakes by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (India) documents the physical condition of the lakes in Mumbai. Apart from the three lakes - Tulsi, Powai and Vihar that used to provide water to Mumbai residents, there are many lakes in the Bombay Municipal Corporation jurisdiction that are either polluted by human sewage or industrial effluents and have remained neglected with increasing urbanization.

There is very little to no data available on the existence of lakes of Mumbai. Several RTI’s to the government bodies also revealed that there was a lacuna in terms of the availability of the data; as a result most of the water bodies are easily exploited. Under this study the baseline data was prepared with the help of Google Earth website. The areas appearing to be lakes were marked on the Google Earth Images. These were verified by the field staff through onsite visits. The survey was conducted during September and October, 2008 and March, 2009. The study considers only the fresh water lakes which were accessible and saline water impoundments have not been considered.

This compendium published by Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI) and CISCO presents selective cases on the use of ICT for effective urban governance and service delivery in India. The document includes the following chapters/sections:

The level of nitrate in drinking water was tested from groundwater artesian wells located within farms and surrounded by crops (mostly rice and wheat rotations).

Nitrate pollution in groundwater is associated with nitrogen loads in the environment. In urban areas, it is associated with sewage and in agriculture areas, with livestock sources and nitrogen fertiliser inputs. Nitrate pollution in drinking water can have serious health impact on humans, especially for babies and children. The most significant potential health effects of drinking water contaminated with nitrate are the blue-baby syndrome (methemoglobinemia) and cancer.

This article published in the discussion section of the Economic and Political Weekly is a critique of the National Water Policy: An alternative draft for consideration, proposed by Ramaswamy Iyer, published in the Economic and Political Weekly, June 25th 2011.

This study by Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC) aims at understanding the livelihood patterns of fishermen within the Tungabhadra sub basin, a tributary of river Krishna located in peninsular India. Lack of integrated approach in development initiatives and water management plans warrants the need for Integrated Water Resource Management to support livelihoods. The study focuses on fisheries as a source of livelihood, current status and institutional support available, people dependant on it, development initiatives and suggestions for improvements.

Author: Jayanta Bandyopadhyay

This article published in the Seminar 626, October 2011 argues that our current state of knowledge of water systems and ecological modelling related to flows of water, which includes projecting a single quantitative figure of water requirements, is inadequate. Such a unilateral prescription of environmental flows or water requirements of aquatic systems as a method for the resolution of water conflicts may actually become the source of many new conflicts.