Groundwater

We at the Water Portal, came up with some questions to ask the builder when you are buying an apartment. The more educated you are regarding the way the apartment is handling water, the better decision you are likely to make and one that will benefit you immensely in the long term.

As ground water levels decline in India, Persian Wheels cannot reach the water to draw them out from open wells. One such Persian wheel stands forlorn and frustrated as the water table has dipped in Kolar, Karnataka India. This wheel has worked for the last 80 years and 2007 was the first time that the water table fell and the wheel could not work for the day.

Forwarded to the Portal by Anuradha Pati Recognises the planning, evaluation, and implementation of water-related projects with the aim of promoting awareness and encouraging the efficient use of this resource. The International ReSource Award is worth US$150,000 in total and is granted to one or several projects selected by an international jury.

"Water MOVES"is a quarterly newsletter from Society for Promotion of Wastelands Development. This issue contains an article on Integrated Water Resource Management by N.C.

Drop by drop ACCESS & HUL in Base of Pyramid Partnership for Safe Drinking Water for Rural Poor:

Yakalakshmi lives in Nekkunda village, Telengana region in Andhra Pradesh with her husband and two children. Though she has water piped to her house by the village panchayat, her entire family fell ill for a month last monsoon season by drinking water directly from the tap. "We all got high fever and severe diarrhea", she says, "we had to spend around Rs. 4000 on health care, which was very difficult for us". So when she got the opportunity this January to buy an effective water purifier through her Self Help Group (SHG) on an installment basis she was one of the first to sign up. Yakalakshmi is just one of the beneficiaries of a unique tie-up between ACCESS Development Services, a microfinance technical services non-profit organization, and Hindustan Unilever Limited, one of the country's largest producers of fast-moving consumer goods, to provide safe drinking water to rural poor. "Most of these villages have piped water or boreholes", says Padma, Project Coordinator at a local NGO, PEACE, "the problem is that tests by UNICEF in this district show that up to 70 percent of these sources are contaminated."The contamination gets even worse during the rainy season, especially due to poor sanitation and waste-management practices.

What exactly is a Persian wheel? Also known as Rahat (in Urdu), it's a simple water lifting device, where a number of small pots are attached to a long chain. Two gear wheels make up the system and as the first one is revolved, the pots each dip and swallow water from the well and soon after pours itself out to a metallic shaft which in turns empties into an intricate network of troughs that distributes water adequately through the cropped area. It is believed that the technology originated in Egypt and as world shrunk through extensive trading, it spread to India and China.

This is a photograph of water recharging done around a water source (like borewell). This is being implemented in some primary schools of the area.

C.P. Kumar of the National Institute of Hydrology, Roorkee provides a list of web communities on hydrology:

(Image taken from the NASA page mentioned below) Several African basins, such as the Congo, Zambezi and Nile, show significant drying over the past five years. In the United States, the Mississippi and Colorado River basins show water storage increases during that time.

In July 2007 India Water Portal collaborated with Chitradurga All India Radio (AIR) station (FM 102.6MHz) to produce and broadcast programs related to rainwater harvesting and ground water management. This activity was part of the 'offline' dissemination program of the Water Portal , i.e. creating awareness related to water issues through different offline media. We feel that the program series is a success and would like to reproduce the experience on a larger scale. The series -- named Mayadanta Male (literal , Magical Rain) involves 15 programs of 30 minutes duration each.