Books and Book Reviews

A number of Asian countries are going through environmental crisis. Nowhere is the impact felt so seriously than in India, where the crisis threatens to affect survival. It is also impacting biodiversity, ecology and livelihoods. In this context, it becomes important to understand how nature and the current environmental crisis are being addressed in policy discourses.

Water, a valuable resource that is magical and mystical, is both mistreated and misunderstood today. Jacques Yves Cousteau once said, "We conveniently forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one" and he doesn't seem too off the mark.

Water touches our lives in many ways. Our childhood memories are often entwined with the rivers that we have crossed, lakes that we have seen and the ponds that we may have jumped in. In his Bharat Darshan, the author Kaka Kalelkar travels across the length and breadth of the country and takes us to many such places we may have visited but have probably forgotten about. He writes about water and life and many a time, the lines blur. 

An engineer or an ecologist talking about water may not cause many heads to turn, but when they do it through poetry, there is a chance that more people will take notice. With water as the recurrent theme, topics including water and technology, dams and development, scarcity and wastage and other such parallel and often conflicting sentiments are echoed in the booklet titled 'Water for All & Other Poems' by G Vekatesh.

Mahananda, a major River of north Bihar rises in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal. It meets the Ganga after a journey of 376 km through the flat lands of Bihar, West Bengal and Bangladesh. It would spill its banks because of the flat slopes, causing deluge and waterlogging in the Katihar district of Bihar. Additionally, the spills of the abandoned channels of the River Kosi like Barnadi and Kari Kosi, added to the impasse. Mahananda, like other north Bihar rivers, brings a lot of loosely packed geological material from the Himalayas that it deposits in the plains.

Aims of the report:

Narmada, a name that translates into ‘One that bestows happiness’ will, in the next 20 years, pass through turbulent times. The question is not of the distance or the journey that this river covers, but the various points at which this ancient river is intercepted by new, modern dams.

Motivated by Anupam Mishra's 'Aaj Bhi Khare Hain Tallab', this book describes the history of the ponds in Vidisha, Madhya Pradesh including details on how these ponds were established and what caused their untimely deaths. Anil Yadav takes us down this path, weaving together myths and lost legends with intricate details of the ponds' construction and economics. 

In 1881, there was one tank every 15 square miles in the then state of Karnataka. These tanks irrigated more than 7 lakh acres of land. Tanks were the major source of irrigation and the system was completely managed by beneficiaries, their construction considered a meritorious deed. Their neglect began under the British rule, and continues till the present day ‘big dam’ commitment.