Surface Water

Noise pollution, a rising threat

Increasing noise pollution is now becoming a global threat affecting both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Aquatic animals are especially vulnerable to noise pollution. This is because visual cues are absent or limited in aquatic environments and animals mostly depend on sounds to process information to survive and sound travels faster underwater. 

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s budget announcement on February 1, 2020 made a push for piped rural drinking water supply and promised full coverage of all households by 2024. Last year, the National Rural Drinking Water Mission (NRDWM) was restructured and subsumed into Jal Jeevan Mission.

Among 22 cities in India, Mumbai has lost the maximum number of wetlands: WISA

Government allocates Rs 11,500 crore to Jal Jeevan Mission for 2020-21

In the budget 2020-21, the Finance Ministry has allocated Rs 11,500 crore to the Jal Jeevan Mission for the year for 2020-21.

The funds will be utilised to identify and create comprehensive measures for 100 water-stressed districts in the country.

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.

Union Finance Minister Ms. Nirmala Sitharaman presented the decade's first union budget in the parliament on 1st February 2020. While presenting budget for 2020-2021, she started with the country’s vision for the decade in which she emphasised on water management and clean rivers as one of the 10 points of vision for the country. The announcement assumes importance in the light of NITI Aayog’s grim estimate that around half of the country’s population or approximately 600 million people face high to extreme water stress.

Guidelines to monitor illegal sand mining released

For the first time, the Environment Ministry has released Enforcement and Monitoring Guidelines for Sand Mining 2020 to monitor and check illegal sand mining in the country.

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.

Gangetic dolphins under threat thanks to increased river traffic

Cauvery riverfront development plan gets a nod