Governance

Love for green: Healing the hills with trees - Work of Sachidanand Bharti in Uttarakhand

From Tubaah (NDTV Network) website (November 26, 2008).

Sachidanand Bharti is known as the treeman in Uttarakhand, where he has been dedicatedly planting trees since the last 25 years. Hills in Uttarakhand were once barren, but now they are lush green, all due to his efforts. Bharti is a school teacher by profession but his real calling is as a climate crusader.

The paper discusses the evolution of Participatory Irrigation Management (PIM) in India, following the felt need for better irrigation management to prevent water scarcity in many regions in the country.

The irrigation sector was identified as a priority area in the various policy reforms that took place in the water sector in the country.These reforms emphasised the importance of involving end users/farmers in the operation and management of irrigation conveyance systems. 

This led to the establishment of the Farmers Managed Irrigation Systems (FAMIS), which aimed at improving the overall efficiency of the irrigation system, generate a sense of ownership among farmers and to improve the irrigation revenue recovery rate. This laid the seeds for Participatory Irrigation Management (PIM) in India.

Content Courtesy: AlertNet

Activists from the Climate Revolution initiative in India have discovered a crucial tool in their battle to hold the government accountable on its climate policies: the country's landmark Right to Information (RTI) Act.

Read more about Climate Revolution's work on RTI on their website here.

In this paper, the authors examine the current debates around India's water crisis and its implications for food security in the country. The paper takes a critical look at the recent official assessments of groundwater exploitation in India in the context of these debates.

The paper proposes that there is a need to make a qualitative assessment of the magnitude of food security and water management challenges facing the country. It argues that two important factors drive the agricultural growth and food production in India. These include access and availability of arable land and water resources, which need to be examined and analysed with particular reference to their regional variations, to get a true understanding of the situation.

As per the Press Information Bureau's press release, the Union Cabinet has approved the proposal of the Ministry of Water Resources for enacting The Dam Safety Bill, on May 13 2010. The Bill is to be introduced in the Parliament.

The main objectives of the legislation are:-

• The new legislation will help the States in adopting uniform dam safety procedures which shall ensure safety of dams and safeguard benefits from such dams.

This brief article by Prof Jayanta Bandyopadhyay in the May 16-31 2010 issue of Business Economics magazine, highlights the recent plans of the central and state goverments of constructing a large number of dams on Himalayan rivers. Environmentalists continue to consistently argue against the construction of dams that are built without respect for ecological sciences and warn that this could lead to increase in disasters in the fragile Himalayan region.

Mazhapolima is a community based well recharge programme, initiated by the Thrissur District Administration in collaboration with the Panchayat Raj Institutions in the District, and implemented by networking NGOs/CBOs, households, departments and agencies, research institutions, private sector and all other key stakeholders, who are either a water user or a water provider/planner.

Diversity of approaches and implementation arrangements according to location specific needs centered on sustainable outcome and service levels are the underlying tenets of the programme. The programme envisages recharging of about 4.5 lakh open wells in the district to ensure sustainable access to water.