Society, Culture, Religion and History

The challenges to sustain groundwater dependency in India are many where groundwater over extraction is not only leading to rapid depletion of the resource, but also giving rise to water quality issues in a situation where the response at the level of policy continues to be lukewarm.

Kotda village provides an inspiring example of how a village suffering from teething troubles in the critical areas of water and sanitation can emerge as a model water and sanitation village. Located in Mangrol block of Junagadh district, from a distance this village presents a lush green appearance because of an abundance of coconut trees. “Despite this, the village was so dirty about two decades back that we used to put a cloth on our nose to block the stench on some village paths," says Kamla, an elderly woman of Kotda. This was because open defecation was practiced by all households.

“Every single number in the budget, be it receipts or expenditure is a lie. The budget numbers can no longer be trusted, as the difference between actual expenditure and budget estimates are off by around 25 percent. The year ends at the end of March, and the estimates are based on data only till the end of December, so the estimate of receipts and expenditure in the next three months is a lie,” says Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University at a panel discussion organised by the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA) in New Delhi recently.

Common pool resources, popularly known as “commons”, are those resources which are accessible to the whole community or village and to which no individual has exclusive ownership or property rights. Commons have two essential characteristics: non-excludability and high-subtractability. Non-excludability means that it is impossible or very costly to restrict a user from using the resource, and subtractability or “rivalness” means that use of the resource by one user will diminish benefits for other users.

Climate change impacts are disproportionate and influence lives and livelihoods variedly. One crucial determinant of these disproportionate impacts is gender. Existing social norms determine roles and responsibilities, entitlements and capabilities, thereby influencing the individual perceptions of shocks and susceptibility which vary across gender groups.

People tend to be happier and reinvigorated in green spaces. Agrobiodiversity - the number and abundance of different species in particular systems is known to promote happiness. It ensures the resilience of ecosystem services such as food production, climate regulation, and pest management that in turn underpin human wellbeing.

The Mahanadi delta in Odisha is a composite delta fed by water, sediments and nutrients from a network of three major rivers: Mahanadi, Brahmani and Baitarini. The coastline of the delta is approximately 200 km long, extending from the Chilika lagoon in the south to the Dhamara river in the north. It has five coastal districts - Puri, Khordha, Jagatsinghpur, Kendrapara and Bhadrak which constitute 83% of the delta area and have large areas below the five metre contour where floods due to cyclones and sea-level rise are common.

Locally called Neeru, water of the Nilgiris in its springs and wetlands has been the fountainhead for two main rivers systems of South India. Today, with growing anthropogenic influences, there is a water crisis in the hills that needs our attention more than ever before.

A recent book ‘Transforming Food Systems for a Rising India’ by the Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition (TCI) at Cornell University provides a detailed assessment of the major paradoxes of the Indian growth story. It is marked by the simultaneous existence of regional inequality, rural and urban food insecurity, intractable malnutrition problems and the growing incidence of overweight and obesity.

A new McKinsey Global Institute report, ‘Climate risk and response: Physical hazards and socioeconomic impacts’, suggests that many assumptions about the potential damage climate risk could cause need to be revisited.