FAILURE OF WATER MANAGEMENT IN INDIA

                                                         Edition-4

Unfortunately, present-day water engineering in India has kept itself preoccupied largely with the promotion of irrigation, hydropower generation & food control to some extent. During the 1960s, pumping ground water aquifers promoted for irrigation. The high-priority but low-volume needs of domestic water for drinking & sanitation to 30% of rural people have still not been met & about 80% of them do not have sanitation.

                             Wide spread suffering of the less privileged from fluorides, arsenic, bacterial contamination or outright industrial pollution do not make news in India. For a country aspiring to be a leading economic power in the world, its inability to provide safe drinking water to every Indian after 61 years of independence is not a matter of pride. The success of community initiatives, like the Jal Biradari in Rajasthan, has shown that provision of small amounts needed for domestic requirements is not a problem even in Arial areas, when people are involved.

                             One of the most critical changes needed in India for a more scientific approach to water management is to internalize ecological sciences in the knowledge base for management.

                     

FAILURE OF WATER MANAGEMENT IN INDIA

                  FAILURE OF WATER MANAGEMENT IN INDIA

                                                       Edition-3

Primary inputs of fresh water to India, in the form of rain, snow, are strongly influenced by the monsoon & are highly skewed in time & unevenly distributed over country. Annual average precipitation over India amounts to about 4,000 billion cubic meters. A close examination of smaller areas gives rise to difficulties. The arid areas in Rajasthan received about 200mm of annual rainfall, while many areas in Meghalaya annually receive over 11,000 mm of rainfall.

                          Further, about 80% of this rainfall occurs during 2-and half months, from July to September. This spatial & temporal inequity in natural distribution of precipitation makes way for some serious challenges in water management in India.

                         Among the various requirements of water, safe drinking water should get the highest priority. In India, irrigation has received the highest investment & irrigation potential has increased from about 20 million hectare in the pre-plan era of the 1950s to about 102 million hectare by the turn of the century.

                            This has been the largest irrigation system in the world but is also among the more inefficient ones. While about a third of the population does not get safe drinking water, the power of irrigation has turned single crop lands to four-crop ones, produced paddy in desert areas & grown flowers on spices in Semi-arid areas.

                            FAILURE OF WATER MANAGEMENT IN INDIA

                                                Edition-2

One of the effective ways of dealing with the problem of providing safe drinking water to every Indian is to have a fundamentally holistic & inclusive water systems management. This new approach has to move beyond the confines of traditional engineering, which has played a successful role in the era of reinforced concrete structures, starting with the construction of the Hover dam in the USA.

                   After decades of the following that strategy based on structural interventions, social & ecological-economic implications have forced are thinking the world over.

                    Starting from the statement of the Dublin conference on Water & Environment In 1992, many experts have emphasized the need for a new paradigm for water management.      

                                  SOLAR ENERGY-FUTURE FOR INDIAN POWER
                                                             Edition-1
Located preferentially in the equatorial Sun Belt of the earth, India receives abundant radiant energy from the sun. In most parts of India, clear sunny weather is experienced 250 to 300 days a year. India receives solar radiation of near to 5,000 trillion KWh per year. This equates to 4-7 KWh/sq.m/year, which is far more than India’s total energy consumption of about 848 billion KWh as projected for FY10 by the Central Electricity Authority. It is evident that India has immense potential & needs to move towards utilizing this potential with appropriate and viable technologies.
Both Solar thermal & Solar Photovoltaic (PV) technologies are rapidly advancing. The solar PV power generation potential of India has been recorded at 20 MW per sq. km., while the country’s solar thermal power generation potential is 35 MW per sq. km.

                                     EVAPORATING INDIA’S ETHANOL PLAN
                                                             Edition-1

As India Climate, warriors start thinking of ways & means to cut down carbon emissions in line with their commitments, one method of reducing emissions is already proving to be a non-starter. The great that Ethanol blended fuel would reduce emissions while simultaneously cutting down India’s oil bill is turning out to be misplaced.

In first week of December, 2009 food & agriculture minister Sharad Pawar, petroleum minister Murli Deora & new & renewable energy minister Farooq Abdulla met to resolve. The issues of the original plan, which envisaged blending 5% ethanol with every liter of petrol, by 2011. The conclusion they reached, ethanol blending was an impractical plan.

                  ECO-FUEL FOR THE WORLD

Massachusetts-based Joule biotechnologies has come up with a new process for developing fuels for automobiles by using carbon di-oxide, sunlight, some micro organism & nothing else. It requires no agricultural land or fresh water.

        The hybrid system was solar concentrating converter that is filled with brackish water, nutrients & highly “engineered synthetic organism” to produce a bio-based fuel. Similar attempts by other companies have been so expensive that crude has cost several hundred dollars a barrel for them to be competitive.

            Joule believes it will be competitive with crude at $50 a barrel. The company officials claim they can meet the whole world liquid fuel needs, & the commercial process will be ready foe demonstration next year.