Urban Water

Content and photo courtesy: Environment Support Group  

On the contentious policy relating to privatization of lakes, the Justice N K Patil Committee appointed by the Karnataka High Court has recommended that private sector participation solely based on commercial interest is not desirable.

In a significant development, the Committee appointed under the Chairmanship of Justice Mr. N. K. Patil, Judge of the Karnataka High Court and Chairman High Court Legal Services Committee, in response to the Public Interest Litigation by Environment Support Group challenging the privatisation of management and rehabilitation of lakes in Bangalore (WP 817/2008), has strongly recommended that ““private sector participation solely based on consequential commercial interest” is not a desirable model” (Emphasis in original).

This document  by the Central Pollution and Control Board (CPCB) describes the findings of a study that evaluated water treatment plants located across the country, for prevailing raw water quality, water treatment technologies, operational practices, chemical consumptio

Organizers: Janaagraha, IIHS, Yale University

Venue: Infosys Training Centre, Mysore

Content courtesy: Janhit Foundation

Adequate potable water supply to the community has become an uphill task to the administration both in rural and urban areas. This is because of dwindling groundwater sources, over-extraction, pollution of surface water bodies, negligence of fresh water bodies, poor water management, etc.

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:

This paper published in the Journal of Asian and African Studies examines the argument that the political and institutional contexts of service delivery shape people's access to the state and its resources and also the mediation between citizens and g

This report by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, Government of India, is the outcome of the deliberations conducted by the committee on slum statistics/census constituted by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation in the context of the realisation that there continues

This report by Manthan Adhyayan Kendra discusses the concerns around the private water supply augmentation project in Khandwa town in Madhya Pradesh under the Urban Infrastructure Development Scheme for Small and Medium Towns (UIDSSMT), a Government of India scheme for infrastructure development in small and medium town. 

Khandwa is the first town in Madhya Pradesh to execute a private water project under this scheme, hence the findings of this project would be important for other towns as well which are looking for implementing private water projects under UIDSSMT.

This report basically focuses on the issues related to the new private water supply augmentation project from Chhoti Tawa, a tributary of Narmada River, and a part of the backwaters of Indira Sagar Project on Narmada. It gives a brief picture of the existing water supply system in Khandwa. It also discusses in details the impacts of the new private water supply project and question marks on the project efficacy.The report looks into the alternative systems that could have been operated instead of the current private, long distance and expensive project.