‘Nothing natural about these disasters’: UNDP report

The UNDP’s ‘Reducing Disaster Risk: A Challenge for Development’ cautions that natural disasters put an enormous strain on development and are a serious threat to achieving the Millennium Development Goals, particularly the target of halving extreme poverty by 2015 (read more...)

VHAI's Project Aparajita helps Orissa's artisans rebuild their lives
By Elisa Patnaik

Project Aparajita has given artisans devastated by the 1999 supercyclone in Orissa a helping hand. Marginalised and impoverished, today they take international orders and travel the country seeking out new ideas and incorporating quality controls (read more...)

Tracking the Drought-III
Dry days in Shivpuri
By Meher Gadekar

In Shivpuri district of Madhya Pradesh, the government provides impressive figures of relief works, fodder and water provided to the drought-hit. But in village after village, people have to trek kilometres to collect water, and claim they see no trace of government supplies of grain or fodder as they fight to survive one of the worst droughts in recent history(read more...)

Tracking the Drought-II
Ratnagiri: Water scarcity amidst plenty
By Meher Gadekar

Even in the verdant coastal districts of India, such as Ratnagiri in Maharashtra which receives 3,000 mm of rainfall annually, the wells have run dry. What has gone wrong? Why are no solutions to conserve/harvest water visible? The second in our series which tracks the drought across India(read more...)

Tracking the Drought-I
Kutch: The story of a tortoise in distress
By Meher Gadekar

All the surface water sources in the vast and desolate flatlands of Kutch, Gujarat, are bone dry. The groundwater tables are falling at alarming rates. How do communities survive the drought here? This is the first in a series of articles tracking the drought(read more...)

Water Resources in India: Bagkground and perspective
By Dr Sudhirendar Sharma

At Independence, only 6% of rural India had access to safe drinking water. That figure has gone up to 82%. The per capita availability of renewable freshwater in the country, however, has fallen drastically over the last 50 years. The water table is rapidly falling with unregulated over-exploitation of groundwater. By 2025, water scarcity in India will be acute. And big dams, mega river-linking projects or privatised water distribution may not help (read more...)