SIMPLE INNOVATIONS LIKE THE TAP HAVE DISTANCED PEOPLE FROM PROBLEMS AT THE SOURCE.
World Water Day has come again. Did we do anything differently about our use and abuse of water since the last Water Day? At the gross level, it appears not. Because, in the context of India, this past year was one of interspersed drought, inflation in food prices, increasing evidence of groundwater depletion and plummeting water quality, rising agitation about river pollution, etc. At least 100 million of our citizens had no assurance of the safety of the water they drank every single day.
Type: Article
Giving Is Easy” – Heroes of Philanthropy
Journalist and novelist. Corporate wife and mother. Now, armed with a fortune from Infosys’ meteoric rise, Rohini Nilekani is intent on helping India’s poor.
48 Heroes of Philanthropy
From helping disaster victims to funding soup kitchens, they make our latest regional list.
Forbes Asia.
Uncommon Ground – For The Children Of India
The debate has shifted to higher studies, but we I cannot afford to take the foot off the pedal on early education.
In this, the final column in this series, I turn to a core area of my work over the past decade—the education and development of young children.
Some sights and sounds remain sharply etched in the mind—the five-year-old in a preschool that we had set up in a Bangalore slum, who cheerily sang a rhyme about butterflies but said she had never seen one; the little children in the fields in Bettiah, who looked like they were just playing, but in actuality were catching tiny fish from the ponds for their dinner; the 10-year-old boy who stood outside a school in Kolar, but could not bridge the social distance to get in.
Uncommon Ground – A Fine Balance in Kutch
There’s a massive export of virtual water from dry regions to wet, through the sale of both milk and meat products.
on work, with soaring temperatures and no promise of rain despite an unusual cloud cover. We travelled a couple of hundred kilometres in the clay desert, despairing at the spread of Prosopis juli-flora which — like so many other
foreign species brought in by the forest department with all good intentions—has now overpowered large tracts of the countryscape, to the detriment of useful, hardy local species.
Uncommon Ground – Tilling The Urban Soil
Urban farming enthusiasts believe it is the best way to green the city, while providing a little food security too.
It is remarkable how much you can grow in a small space with very little fuss. My colleague Vishwanath, who himself has demonstrated the viability of growing paddy on his small rooftop garden, taught me to grow vegetables in the boxes in which truck batteries are sold! Sitting pretty on the terrace, they provide an environment safe from bandicoots to grow consumables.
And the joy of having something that is grown around us, and plucked fresh for the kitchen, is indescribable, the experience priceless. And of course, the food tastes much better, too.
Uncommon Ground – Greening The Toilet
The past century of sanitation has been an environmental and financial nightmare for the world.
It is supposedly the 100th anniversary of the modern lavatory, though there is some dispute about when the modern flush toilet as we now know it was invented and by whom. Nevertheless, for the billions around the world who take their daily convenience for granted and for the remaining billions who have no access to modern sanitation, it is a good opportunity to sit and think about the future of human waste, of which millions of tonnes is generated every day.
Uncommon Ground – Mind The Gender Gap
Not only does violence against women continue in the old brutality, it is taking new bewildering forms.
Twenty-five years ago, I used to volunteer with Vimochana, a women’s group that focuses on violence against women. At that time in Bangalore, dowry deaths were particularly disturbing, and much work was being done to raise awareness about the issue. On a day when papers reported five cases of unnatural deaths of women in the city, I had cccasion to catch up with Vimochana’s indefatigable Donna and Madhu again.
Uncommon Ground – A Conflict Of Paradigms
The demand for limited fresh water has brought the issue to the centre of the debate on development.
At summertime, thoughts turn naturally to water. For millions of citizens, especially women, it is a time of extreme shortage, and for ever more creative coping mechanisms. Many states have improved access to lifeline water, but there is still a long way to go.
In terms of total availability of fresh water, things are not going to improve. Even though water is a renewable resource, it is finite, and per capita availability of water in India has gone down from 6,008 cu. m. in 1947 to 1,820 cu. m. in 2001—it will dip further over the next 30 years.
Uncommon Ground – Rising From The Ashes
There is a growing consensus that this crisis is unlike any other, that it’s a discontinuity with potential for great change.
The airy cafe at London’s British Museum, just across a hallway exhibiting newly discovered mummies of sacred animals from ancient Egypt, was the perfect place to chat with John Elkington about the Phoenix Economy.
John, who coined the phrase “triple bottom line”, to include not just profits, but people and the planet, now believes that a new business ethos will rise from the ashes of the current crisis.