Public Infrastructure and Services

The theme of this year’s World Water Day was “energy-water nexus”. It was almost as if the topic was chosen keeping Western Uttar Pradesh in mind because the conflict between water and energy users in agriculture and industry has heightened here in the recent past.

National Highway 10 passes through Badophal, a village in Fatehabad district of Haryana. The highway is lined by a tiny market and a point where several jeeps start and terminate. These jeeps are headed to Gorakhpur village, some 15 kms away via Kajal Heri, another village en route.

Floods in Bihar have acquired menacing proportions following the embanking of its rivers, which has led to severe dislocations in the society. Estimates suggest that 70% of the population in north Bihar lives under the recurring threat of flood devastation (1). The 2013 floods affected more than 5.9 million people in 3768 villages (2).

Arunachal Pradesh, a state rich in water resources, has a huge potential for cheap and plentiful power. Isolated and one of the least developed states in the country, today it is viewed as the ‘powerhouse’ of the country.

Our day-to-day dependence on fresh water is tremendous, whether for domestic or agricultural use. Theoretically, we know that it is a finite resource and that it can't be taken for granted but in practice, we do. India has an average rainfall of around 1150 mm but lets out nearly 1263 billion cubic metres of water into the sea unutilized. 

If you try to map where indigenous people live and where abundant biodiversity exists, you will notice a big overlap. It might seem like coincidence, but it isn't. Indigenous people have long shared and declared a strong connection to their traditional landscapes. They have had methods to protect, preserve and live harmoniously with nature.

The document titled ‘Sanitation Policy of Jharkhand’, by the Government of Jharkhand, serves as a guidance manual to follow the directives of the Nirmal Bahrat Abhiyan (NBA), a government programme to tackle open defecation in rural India.

Charkhari, a princely state of India in the colonial period was once a beautiful settlement founded by Saurabh Singh Bundela, a Rajput King. Acceded to India post-Independence, the town is now located in Mahoba, Uttar Pradesh. The place was home to intricate water management systems in the past.

Northeast India has been in turmoil over the last two decades or so because of unbridled hydropower development in the region. This article is an effort to understand the extent of hydropower development in the region, the multi-faceted and multi layered conflicts unleashed by this development and also explore ways of engaging with them. It is organised around three broad sections:

Women patiently wait for the sun to go down, to squat in open fields. Young children do so unabashedly on the roads under the open skies. Well into our 67th year of independence, the sanitation situation hasn't changed much in villages and towns across the nation.