It’s been said that the Sardar Sarovar dam would provide many with access to water and power. But there’s no such thing as a free thaali, as Gujaratis, of all people, must surely know. Someone has to bear the cost, and that cost, as with all major development projects, has been borne by the poor….
Read More about Salil Tripathi: The real cost of big development projects
From Down to Earth: India’s vicious cycle of crippling drought and then devastating floods, which happens every year, is getting a new normal. First, floods and droughts come together. Secondly, rainfall is not only variable but also extreme. There’s only one answer: obsessive attention to building millions and millions of connected and living water structures….
Read More about Sunita Narain: Old answers for ‘new’ monsoon
Nowadays there are no pilots, there are no independent evaluations, no concept of conflict of interest. I am wondering if this is also the case even in your “Rally for Rivers”. This letter’s not just about your rally, but expresses my concerns about “development” in this country. And how the Babas are all in it….
Read More about Uma Shankari: An open letter to Sadhguru (and other “Hurry Babas”)
Ecologise has consistently driven home that humanity needs to prepare for unprecedented environmental, economic and socio-political upheaval and uncertainty in the 21st century. In this new series, we showcase free short-duration online courses that focus on these various emerging crises and possible responses. Created by the world’s leading universities, they offer a good starting point to explore these complex challenges….
Read More about Module 3: Water – Scarcity, Contamination, Conservation
From The Wire: As the Gujarat government rushes to close the Sardar Sarovar dam gates ahead of elections, 40,000 residents of the Narmada valley are facing a nightmare of submergence. It’s this injustice and violence, and the development paradigm debate –development for whom and at what cost– that makes Narmada a litmus test for India….
Read More about Medha Patkar: Politics over Narmada, once again
Busting apart this aging dam in Connecticut opened up 27 kilometers of salmon habitat
Lia McLaughlin/USFWS
From Hakai Magazine: For almost 15 years, Harold and Gephard have removed five dams from Connecticut waterways. They spend most of their time meeting owners whose ties to their dams can go back centuries. “It’s about trying to get dam owners to do something that they can’t quite decide. You have to basically say, ‘trust me.’”…
Read More about Dam busters! The nascent green movement liberating rivers and freeing fishFrom Daily O: Two important things stand out: lack of information at the grassroots level and the attitude of policymakers, and to some extent people too, towards dealing with floods. Assam’s information network has improved, but population explosion forces people to risk lives for a few weeks of floods by living at the river bank….
Read More about Nivedita Khandekar: Why floods in Assam and Bihar are worsening over timeFrom Hindustan Times: The NGT has repeatedly criticised Bengaluru’s civic authorities this year for letting the city’s water bodies become toxic waste dumps. The central body could find similarly mistreated lakes in countless Indian cities, where wetlands are being lost due to urbanisation, changes in land use and pollution. What lakes have survived are shrinking….
Read More about From Bangalore to Srinagar, India’s lakes are dead in the water
Wikimedia Commons
From EarthaMag: India recently conferred biodiversity heritage status on the Ameenpur Lake on the fringes of Hyderabad. Other sites across the country also received this distinction. But what sets Ameenpur Lake apart is that the tag is the first of its kind in the country for a water body, and the first in an urban environment….
Read More about India’s first urban biodiversity heritage site – A ray of hope
Untreated effluents dumped into Sabarmati downstream of Vasna barrage, which is the dead-end of Sabarmati Riverfont
Amruta Pradhan/SANDRP
From Counterview.org: The Sabarmati River Front has been in the news lately as a model of “river beautification”. When in reality, it is a dead river, filled with effluents and sewage. It was “rejuvenated” with Narmada water, which came at a great cost of the displacement of lakhs of people and destruction of the environment….
Read More about Sabarmati riverfront, inland waterways, Mahanadi dispute, are all newer forms of onslaught on rivers
Coral reef in Papua New Guinea's Kimbe Bay. Almost all coral reefs may experience bleaching by 2050
David Doubilet/National Geographic
From National Geographic: Our waters have borne the brunt of global-warming for decades, but dying corals, extreme weather, and plummeting fish stocks are signs that it can handle no more. And people are already experiencing direct consequences, such as more extreme weather events, says a new report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature….
Read More about The oceans can’t protect us anymore—here’s why
Protests gather pace across Narmada Valley after the Supreme Court asks the government to relocate all affected families by July 31
Narmada Bachao Andolan
Fifty-six years after the foundation stone for the Sardar-Sarovar dam on the Narmada was laid, the Gujarat government has got permission from the Centre to shut its gates. It will open the gates of misery for more than 100,000 people, whose houses and land are likely to get submerged. A Down To Earth ground report….
Read More about What Gujarat govt calls ‘historic’, could be catastrophic for 1,00,000 villagersKen-Betwa river-linking project, if realised, will destroy livelihoods and ecology, including a portion of the Panna Tiger Reserve. Curiously enough, ground reports show that farmers in the project area are themselves not keen on it. Also included is a documentary, ‘Links of a Broken Chain’, as well as a detailed technical analysis of the project….
Read More about How the disastrous Ken-Betwa link project endangers India’s tigers, rivers and mountains
V. Govindankutty at the Naubad karez, an ancient engineering marve
K.V.S.Giri
From The Hindu: Bidar’s Naubad karez, or tunnel wells, are an ancient engineering marvel. It’s a complex system, which works inversely underground to leverage gravity — that is, the plateau’s natural gradient ascends from the mouth to the mother well but the tunnel underneath has been cut to descend from the mother well to the mouth….
Read More about How Bidar beat back the drought
Representative image
Devinder Sharma writes: The development process is so designed that cities have been made drought proof over the years… Life in the mega city does not even provide an inkling of a severe drought prevailing everywhere in the state, where as many as 139 of the 176 taluks have been declared drought hit this year….
Read More about How come Bangalore doesn’t give an inkling of the severe drought in its backyard?From Business Insider: Some of us get our water for free from the tap. The rest pay for it – at the cost of roughly $US100 billion a year. But there are plenty of reasons to stop buying bottled water. Read on to find out all the things you didn’t know about your drinking water….
Read More about Here’s why bottled water is one of the biggest scams of the century
From The Tribune: The drought has affected 21 of the 32 districts, including the ‘rice bowl’ area of the Cauvery delta, where we travelled. Farmers’ distress was visible everywhere. This is not just a natural disaster. Our travel made it clear that a good deal of farmers’ distress is due to man-made or policy-induced disaster….
Read More about Yogendra Yadav: Tamil Nadu’s drought is also a policy-induced disaster
The Aghanashini river
Manjunath Bhat/Flickr, CC BY 2.0
TheWire.in reports: The Aghanashini is one of the last free flowing rivers in Karnataka: it has no major industrial establishments, dams or townships on its banks. It is in this rich and highly productive estuary that the state government plans to build a multi-purpose estuarine port, which’s now one last step away from final clearance….
Read More about A rare, pristine estuary comes under threat in Karnataka
Circle of Blue
Keith Schneider reports: The thickening chain of death and sorrow in the Cauvery Delta, formed from the powerful links of water, agricultural, and industrial policy, is bludgeoning Tamil Nadu. The human toll, counted in the escalating numbers of shattered hearts, is a disturbing measure of how extravagant, water-consuming development practices no longer fit environmental conditions….
Read More about Worst drought in 140 years leads to farmer deaths, riots, policy impasse in Cauvery Delta
This is the introductory article in Firstpost’s nine-part series of ground reports on the ongoing water crisis in south India. The series will cover various aspects of the near-calamitous situation in Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, with the onset of blistering heat waves that are putting more pressure on existing water resources….
Read More about Drought in South India: A Firstpost special series
