Water Management

About Arghyam

Excella Orbit, a division of Sambodhi Research & Communications Pvt. Ltd., announces the training programme on Basic and Advanced Analysis using SPSS to be held at following cities; June 23 - 26, 2009 - Chennai, July 15 - 18, 2009 - Mumbai, July 28 - 31, 2009 - Hyderabad, August 10 - 13, 2009 - New Delhi. The aim of the programme is to enable participants to Input data into SPSS, select appropriate data analysis techniques, perform requisite analyses using SPSS, interpret the data output for various decision- making needs and present output to specific users in user friendly manner.

Uday Shankar from water.org welcomed the audience and introduced the issue of access to safe water and sanitation. Gary White, water.org, set the tone of the seminar by explaining his organisation’s vision of ‘getting safe water’ for everyone.

Water rights are being discussed today as a possibility. This will lead to civil war in this country. Rights are meaningless without paying attention to duties. It is our constitutional duty to preserve and heal our environment. 

If we pay attention to freeing our waters:

the drought situation in Maharashtra, the traditional rainwater harvesting system in Rajasthan. Besides this, the news also includes reports on the campaign to save the Loktak lake in Assam and mangroves in Sundarbans, the water supply schemes in Kerala and the dropping of groundwater levels in India

New bill to control groundwater exploitation

Human excreta is loaded with nutrients, which when disposed off discriminately, increases pollution and leads to a loss of resources. On an average a human being produces some 500 litres of urine and 50 kilograms of faeces a year, sufficient to fertilise plants that would produce more than 200 kilograms of cereals!

There is a palpable sense of a looming water crisis in India. Conflicts across competing users and uses are on the rise. In the irrigation sector, it is widely felt that “paucity of resources and poor performance of existing major and medium irrigation systems are the two main problems”(1).

This three day national seminar was jointly organised by the Kerala State Council for Science, Technology and Environment (KSCSTE), Thiruvananthapuram, and the C Achutha Menon Foundation (AMF), Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala and included presentations and discussions on a range of water related themes such as water scarcity, water conservation, commercialisation of water, water conflicts and water management.

The seminar aimed at creating awareness and triggering a dialogue among scientists, academicians, researchers, activists, as well as lay people on the emerging challenges related to water resources, water quality and water conservation in the state of Kerala. The seminar was inaugurated by Shri V M Sudheeran, Ex MP and former speaker, while Dr Rajasekaran Pillai, Executive Vice President KSCSTE, delivered the keynote address with the felicitation by Shri M P Achuthan, MP.

The seminar included discussions under five different themes related to water issues that included water scarcity, water conservation, commercialisation of water, water as an new area for conflicts and water management.

The three day seminar on water management at the Achuta Menon Foundation, Trivandrum, Kerala