Proceedings of the International Seminar on 'Water Crisis in the Indian Subcontinent : Issues and Challenges', held at North-Eastern Hill University during 23-25 November 2009.

Water is a prime natural resource and a basic necessity for sustaining life on earth. Supplying adequate amount of potable water to the global population is a gigantic task in the wake of growing industrial and domestic needs. The threat of climate change and global warming which has aggravated the problem of water shortage is of particular concern to India as we are largely dependent on glaciers and rainfall for water supply. The United Nations World Water Development Report, Water: A Shared Responsibility emphasizes the need for good governance to meet the ever-increasing demand for water. The report asserts that mismanagement, corruption, lack of appropriate institutions, bureaucratic inertia and paucity of investment in human and physical sources mar water management today. The situation calls for right policy decisions and adoption of sustainable practices. The problem is acute in India because of its high population density, space and time variability of rainfall and increasing depletion and contamination of its surface and groundwater resources. Most water resources in India are contaminated by sewage and agricultural run-off. Besides, overuse of pesticides and chemicals in agriculture is the primary cause of groundwater pollution in India. Further, uneven water distribution across the country is another aspect of water problem. A large area of the country is water deficit whereas a small part is bestowed with abundance of water. This has led to inter-state conflicts. The present anthology contains well researched articles by eminent scholars who have deeply analysed the problem and its various implications. Major factors responsible for the problem have been studied in detail and some measures have been suggested to retrieve the situation. The book will serve as a reference source for students, researchers and policymakers and all those concerned with an ensured supply of water across the country.

A part of the Water Resources Management series, this book is divided in three sections. The section on Nepal discusses how its water resources could be utilized to benefit people of the Ganga basin. The section on India talks about the development and management of water resources at the beginning of the third millennium. The section on Bangladesh talks about how water resources management is a major challenge in the country.

Few people actively engaged in India's water sector would deny that the Indian subcontinent faces serious problems in the sustainable use and management of water resources. Water resources in India have been subjected to tremendous pressures from increasing population, urbanization, industrialization, and modern agricultural methods. The inadequate access to clean drinking water, increase in water related disasters such as floods and droughts, vulnerability to climate change and competition for the resource amongst different sectors and the region poses immense pressures for sustainability of water systems and humanity. Water Security in India addresses these issues head on, analyzing the challenges that contemporary India faces if it is to create a water-secure world, and providing a hopeful, though guarded, road-map to a future in which India's life-giving and life-sustaining fresh water resources are safe, clean, plentiful, and available to all, secured for the people in a peaceful and ecologically sustainable manner.

Dirty, Sacred Rivers explores South Asia's increasingly urgent water crisis, taking readers on a journey through North India, Nepal and Bangladesh, from the Himalaya to the Bay of Bengal. The book shows how rivers, traditionally revered by the people of the Indian subcontinent, have in recent decades deteriorated dramatically due to economic progress and gross mismanagement. Dams and ill-advised embankments strangle the Ganges and its sacred tributaries. Rivers have become sewage channels for a burgeoning population. To tell the story of this enormous river basin, environmental journalist Cheryl Colopy treks to high mountain glaciers with hydrologists; bumps around the rough embankments of India's poorest state in a jeep with social workers; and takes a boat excursion through the Sundarbans, the mangrove forests at the end of the Ganges watershed. She lingers in key places and hot spots in the debate over water: the megacity Delhi, a paradigm of water mismanagement; Bihar, India's poorest, most crime-ridden state, thanks largely to the blunders of engineers who tried to tame powerful Himalayan rivers with embankments but instead created annual floods; and Kathmandu, the home of one of the most elegant and ancient traditional water systems on the subcontinent, now the site of a water-development boondoggle. Colopy's vivid first-person narrative brings exotic places and complex issues to life, introducing the reader to a memorable cast of characters, ranging from the most humble members of South Asian society to engineers and former ministers. Here we find real-life heroes, bucking current trends, trying to find rational ways to manage rivers and water. They are reviving ingenious methods of water management that thrived for centuries in South Asia and may point the way to water sustainability and healthy rivers.

Few people actively engaged in India's water sector would deny that the Indian subcontinent faces serious problems in the sustainable use and management of water resources. Water resources in India have been subjected to tremendous pressures from increasing population, urbanization, industrialization, and modern agricultural methods. The inadequate access to clean drinking water, increase in water related disasters such as floods and droughts, vulnerability to climate change and competition for the resource amongst different sectors and the region poses immense pressures for sustainability of water systems and humanity. Water Security in India addresses these issues head on, analyzing the challenges that contemporary India faces if it is to create a water-secure world, and providing a hopeful, though guarded, road-map to a future in which India's life-giving and life-sustaining fresh water resources are safe, clean, plentiful, and available to all, secured for the people in a peaceful and ecologically sustainable manner.

Few people actively engaged in India''s water sector would deny that the Indian subcontinent faces serious problems in the sustainable use and management of water resources. Water resources in India have been subjected to tremendous pressures from increasing population, urbanization, industrialization, and modern agricultural methods. The inadequate access to clean drinking water, increase in water related disasters such as floods and droughts, vulnerability to climate change and competition for the resource amongst different sectors and the region poses immense pressures for sustainability of.

The Himalaya-Hindu Kush mountain range and the Tibetan Plateau birth ten of Asia's most prominent rivers providing irrigation, energy, and drinking water to over two billion people across several countries today. Therefore, transboundary water sharing is a constant source of conflict for several South Asian countries that rely on rivers to support their primarily agrarian economies. In recent years, climate change has drastically increased global temperatures. As a result, the Indian subcontinent has been plagued with extreme riverine flood and drought events. Climate change-related events like riverine floods and drought, exacerbate the politicization of conflict between nations that share natural resources like water. This politicization is visible in the media coverage of conflict, and the way water-sharing issues are linked with other transboundary conflicts, especially those pertaining to national security. This paper explores the relationship between climate change and water-sharing conflicts in three South Asian nations: India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the national media coverage of transboundary river systems, Indus and Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna, this honors thesis explores how climate change affects the politicization of water-sharing conflicts between these three nations.

From time immemorial the Bengal Delta had been an important maritime des- nation for traders from all parts of the world. The actual location of the port of call varied from time to time in line with the natural hydrographic changes. From the early decades of the second millennium AD, traders from the European con- nent also joined the traders from the Arab countries, who had been the Forerunners in maritime trading with India. Daring traders and fortune seekers from Denmark, Holland, Belgium and England arrived at different ports of call along the Hooghly river. The river had been, in the meantime, losing its pre-eminence as the main outlet channel of the sacred Ganga into the Bay of Bengal, owing to a shift of ?ow towards east near Rajmahal into the Padma, which had been so long, carried very small part of the large volume of ?ow. On a cloudy afternoon on August 24, 1690 the British seafarer Job Charnock rested his oars at Kolkata and started a new chapter in the life of a sleepy village, bordering the Sunderbans which was ‘a tangled region of estuaries, rivers and water courses, enclosing a vast number of islands of various shapes and sizes. ’ and infested with a large variety of wild animals. In the language of the British Nobel Laureate (1907) Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). ???? ???? Thus the midday halt of Charnock grew a city.

This publication presents the results of more than five consecutive years of focused research initiatives and designs from The University of Virginia School of Architecture towards the revitalization of New Delhi, India’s water bodies. In collaboration with the Delhi Jal Board, The University of Virginia’s Yamuna River Project is an inter-disciplinary research program, proposing to revitalize the ecology of the Yamuna River in Delhi and creating vital urban links with the Yamuna River as it flows through India’s capital city. Through the research, methodologies, and designs contained within this publication, this project aims to serve as a catalyst for the urgent recovery of the Yamuna River and its tributaries, building a publically accessible body of information and expertise resulting in visions of what an alternative future would be. Only by addressing human equality and the complexity of Delhi’s urban phenomenon can the social and ecological crises manifested through these neglected water bodies be solved.