-Down to Earth Water bodies have become even more critical in current times when cities are facing the challenge of rapid, unplanned urbanisation Lakes and wetlands are an important part of urban ecosystem. They perform significant environmental, social and economic functions — from being a source of drinking water and recharging groundwater to supporting biodiversity and providing livelihoods. Their role becomes even more critical in the present context, when cities are facing the...

-TheThirdPole.net Migrant workers in India, Pakistan and Nepal are crushed by poverty as earnings come to an abrupt halt in the lockdown forced by the Covid-19 pandemic Across South Asia, the impact of the Covid-19 on livelihoods has been extreme. Despite being an outlier in terms of low infection rates, and even low casualties, most South Asian countries have been left reeling due to the impact that shutdowns have had on migrant...

-Down to Earth blog Overburdened drainage, frenzied and unregulated construction, no regard to the natural topography and hydro-geomorphology all make Urban floods a man-made disaster The recent floods in Bihar and Eastern Uttar Pradesh have taken by surprise both governments and people. In Patna, severe water logging has brought the city to a halt, with hospitals and residential areas filled with waist-deep water. Transport services have been disrupted, with many trains cancelled. There is...

-Newsclick.in With the union government now giving a huge push to the use of solar pumps for extracting groundwater for irrigation, the problem of depletion gets further compounded. Buldhana (Maharashtra): As a large part of India reels under floods this monsoon, there might seem little reason to dwell on groundwater depletion. Yet, government policy might be putting the already over-used groundwater at greater risk. In 2012, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural...

-Down to Earth Over 60 years after the country got its first plan to rejuvenate the rivers, not a single basin has been spared from overexploitation All the 20 river basins of the country share the story of the Cauvery: how human interference has changed every river’s form and flow pattern over the past few decades. Water in the country’s three major rivers — the Indus, the Brahmaputra and the Ganga — has...