Bangalore

The India Urban Conference (IUC) was organised to encourage multi-level dialogue regarding India's urban transformation. It aimed to set the challenges faced by urban planners in the current economic, socio-political, and ecological landscape. This would enable informed and negotiated choices on urban development. The stated objectives of the conference are as follows:Read More

• To make urban, applied research relevant to an increased spectrum of stakeholders including academics, civil societies, policy think tanks, research institutes, media, private sector, and citizens.
• To leverage experience to generate useful evidence to promote applied research and responsive policy-making.
• To create new research initiatives and/ or collaborations with a potential for creating tangible changes/ reforms for the benefit of urban India and its context.
• To identify and explore research issues affecting urban India, by exploring through a perspective of eight selected themes.
• Publish research papers and evidence presented/ discussed in the form of case-books, web publications, and potentially a special issue of a journal.
  

Seminar magazine focuses on a pertinent topic each month. In October 2011, the issue titled 'Shades of blue' dealt with water conflicts and challenges in India.

The problem

(as posed by Sunjoy Joshi, Director and Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, Delhi)

Here, the author explains that intense struggles over water are giving rise to conflicts at several levels, including individual, local, regional and international. These struggles over a resource exacerbate power struggles.

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This report by the Central Water Commission (CWC) attempts to provide the water quality scenario of our rivers and evolve a methodology for identifying hot spots in Indian rivers. The water quality data is based on the average values observed during the last ten years (2001-2011) at 371 monitoring stations of CWC on almost all major, medium and minor rivers in India. In respect of Dissolved Oxygen and Biochemical Oxygen Demand, the Central Pollution Control Board's classification has been considered for evaluating the hot spot in the rivers.

The physical and chemical quality of river water is important in deciding its suitability for drinking purposes. As such the suitability of river water for potable uses with regard to its chemical quality has to be deciphered and defined on the basis of the some vital characteristics of the water. Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) vide its document IS: 10500:1991, edition 2.2 (2003‐09) has recommended the quality standards for drinking water and these have been used for finding the suitability of river water. On this basis of classification, the natural river water of India has been categorized as desirable, permissible and unfit for human consumption.

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