Migration

This report by the Strategic Foresight Group is a follow-up to its earlier report The Himalayan Challenge: Water Security in Emerging Asia, 2010 and provides ideas for cooperative solutions to enhance water security in Asia. The growing water stress, plans for dams on shared rivers, and uncertainties about the precise impact of climate change have brought water to the forefront of the political agenda of countries in the Himalayan River Basins.

The report recommends policy options for national governments as well as strategies which can be implemented by local authorities and community groups in a politically viable manner. Some of the ideas may on the surface appear to be addressing micro-level issues. However, such micro-level issues do have an important bearing on security at the macro-level in a large continent such as Asia. This is the experience of many other regions as well, as illustrated in several of the chapters in this report.

The objective of this report is to explore how river basins in the Himalayan region, and particularly shared water resources, can foster cooperation and security between Bangladesh, China, India and Nepal. The conventional view is that depleting water resources, growing problem of pollution, uncertain risks posed by climate change together may lead to competition for resources, migration, social instability, internal conflicts and diplomatic tensions between countries. This view is realistic and was discussed in detail in a previous report of Strategic Foresight Group. It has contributed to spreading the awareness of security risks associated with water crisis in the Himalayan region.

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This report from Geospatial World presents an impact assessment of urbanization in the Indian city of Ranchi. Patterns of spatial and temporal urban changes have been analysed efficiently using spatial and temporal technologies such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) along with collateral data such as Survey of India (SOI) maps, etc.

In order to study the change of spatial extent of growth and infrastructural facilities, SOI toposheet number 73 E/7 along with IRS PAN with a resolution of 2.5m, LISS-III and LANDSAT-TM was used to generate different layers of years 1972, 2004, 2006 and 2010 respectively. The census of the city was integrated with the above mentioned data to identify the elements at risk associated with different forms of urban hazards. 

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The  mission of the Rajasthan Urban Housing and Habitat Policy (RUHHP - 06) is:

• To provide shelter to all the sections of the population
• To ensure sustainable development of human settlements
• To ensure a better quality of life for the population
• To adopt a multisectoral approach and involve and use the potential of all levels of stakeholders.

The RUHHP-06 is broadly in consonance with latest National  Housing and Habitat Policy-2005 (Ist draft has been issued). The document goes on to highlight the present urban and  rural situation in Rajasthan, the increasing population density in the urban areas because of migration of people from rural to urban areas and the housing issues arising because of this increased density of population in urban areas.Read More

The policy thus focuses on balanced development, promotion of in situ-urbanisation, vertical construction and the use of sustainable development models.

This manual has been developed by the Central Public Health and Environmental Engineering Organisation (CPHEEO), a department under the Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) and  serves as a standard guide in public health engineering by providing a code of day to day practice for public health engineers to follow.Read More