Belgaum

This report by Price Waterhouse Coopers India Limited for the Second Annual India Water Conference in April 2011 presents its view on urban water reforms for the next decade. India is still at an early stage of the urbanisation process and will witness exponential growth in many of its cities over the next few decades. By 2030 the urban population is expected to reach more than 590 million. This will put enormous pressure on all existing resources, especially water. Despite sufficient availability of raw water, many of its cities struggle to provide more than a few hours of water supply.

Improving water availability in the cities requires addressing complex policy, institutional and funding challenges. According to the report, the collective vision should be to provide good quality, reliable, affordable and continuous (24x7) water supply to residents. The core of the new approach will include instituting a new era of greater accountability and a performance-driven approach. Service delivery to urban poor has to be an integral part of this approach to bring about greater inclusiveness.

Recent experience with Public-Private-Partnerships (PPP) in urban water supply shows that with a customer focused approach and demonstration of clear benefits, there will be greater political and public acceptability of private participation. At the same time, fiscal framework at the local level has to be considerably strengthened before attempting wide scale replication of PPP. 

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This paper by the Institute of Social and Economic Change (ISEC) examines the extent of groundwater dependency and quality status in four South Indian cities viz., Hubli, Dharwad, Belgaum and Kolar cities. Widespread water shortage problems have resulted in increased dependency on groundwater with tapping the resources to unsustainable levels. In Karnataka, out of 208 urban local bodies that come under Karnataka Urban Water Supply and Drainage Board, 41 depend on groundwater.Read More

The study deals with estimation of surface soil properties in Malaprabha command area. It can be broadly concluded that generalization of soil properties for an area is difficult since the soil and land use type varies drastically from one point to another in a short distance. It is only possible to have an average value for a particular type of soil. Also, it can be seen from the results that the percentage of silt-clay plays an important role in shaping the hydraulic properties of a soil.Read More

In this study, a two layered finite difference method has been generated for groundwater flow analysis of Ghataprabha sub-basin of Krishna river basin. The conceptual model has been calibrated for steady state conditions and validated for both steady state and transient conditions through USGS, 3D Finite Difference Code and MODFLOW. Various applications were tried out on the calibrated model, like River-Drain influencing the aquifer, reasons for waterlogging and drying out of wells and well design strategies.Read More