Water Crisis in Chennai, Ministry of Jal Shakti -Down to Earth 1st to 15th August 2019

University Grants Commission՚s (UGC) Consortium for Academic and Research Ethics (CARE) recently released a new list of quality journals that will be considered for publication of all academic work. Extreme weather events displaced 10.3 million people in China, India and the Philippines in 2018.

Important Facts!

  • Slums are found in 65 per cent of towns in India.
  • Six of 10 slum dwellers live close to unsanitary drains and almost four of every 10 do not get treated water
  • Konyak tribe of Nagaland - warrior community now as shifting cultivation, handicrafts or remittance sent by their migrant relatives for sustenance

MGNREGA

  • Online monitoring of MGNREGA involves geo-tagging of 3 million structures annually and over 100 million workers
  • The demand for work under MGNREGA can also be correlated with other real-time measures of weather, such as untimely rain, hail or snow that destroys crops and lead to rural distress. Moreover, drought is not the only trigger for an increase in MGNREGA numbers. A pest attack that destroys crops could force people to opt for MGNREGA, so could land acquisitions for a big infrastructure project.
  • The law says that if the government does not provide job to an applicant within 15 days, it must give him⟋her an allowance. Since governments do not want that, they do not register demands. Whenever they are able to give a job, they work the dates backwards and say the application came 15 days ago
  • In drought-struck Amravati and Nagpur districts of Maharashtra, for instance, 0.18 million people have demanded work under mgnrega, while in Kolhapur and Raigad, which were relatively better off, the number is just 18,798. Similar is the case of Andhra Pradesh, where drought-hit Kurnool and Prakasam districts have 1.6 million people demanding work while in Kadapa and Visakhapatnam, the figure is less than 0.8 million.

Cauvery

  • Deforestation, urbanisation, illegal mining and dumping of effluents along the river has left the basin battered and bruised.
  • For some 15 million people living on the banks of this river and its 21 tributaries
  • The Cauvery՚s tributaries, Harangi and Lakshmantirtha, are absolutely dry. b
Map location in Harangi, Lakshmantirtha Uttar Kannad
  • Silver oak is used as plywood, areca nut is grown for its fruit supari and palm for its oil.
  • People planted new species of trees replacing the traditional jackfruit, rosewood, nandi and hone trees, and all varieties of bamboo. These are endemic to the area. They have thick and deep roots, and hold water underground
  • 2007 to 2017, land under coffee plantation increased by 4,000 ha in Kodagu (now has 43% coffee plantations of India & 80% India՚s coffee from Karnataka) . Excessive plantation of coffee reduced groundwater levels - increased need for borewells
  • Western Ghats, one of the world՚s top eight biodiversity hotspots, lost 20,000 ha of tree cover in four Karnataka districts- Uttar Kannada, Dakshin Kannada, Udupi and Kodagu. In 2015, about 50,000 trees were cut in Kodagu to set up electricity lines for industries. Another 300,000 trees are going to be cut to widen national highways 4A, 75 and 13, and for a railway project to connect Kodagu with Mysuru
  • The Cauvery touches Kerala at Wayanad in the form of Kabini, the river՚s tributary, and flows till Mysuru
  • Club Mahindra extracts 0.25 million litres of water every day from Koothole dam, the main source of drinking water for at least 12 surrounding villages. The resort also has a huge private reservoir
  • TDS level of potable water should be below 300 mg per litre. In Mettur and Erode, TDS level is an astounding 1,750 and 1,450 mg per litre. The average TDS level in the Cauvery is 753 mg per litre.
  • Every day, illegal miners dig the riverbed and supply 10,000 lorries of sand to the construction industry.

Construction Industry & Water!

  • Delhi reportedly loses as much as 40 per cent of the city՚s water input, mostly due to old and leaking pipes
  • Construction can consume between 3,000 and 8,000 litres of water for every square metre of built up area
  • Water consumption for construction can be further optimised by adopting water-efficient materials and technology
  • Grass in the lawns of the rich of Lutyens Delhi and Bengaluru՚s Koramangala can be replaced with succulents
  • 70 per cent of our water supply is contaminated, resulting in nearly 200,000 deaths each year.

Rivers and Catchment Area

Ministry of Jal Shakti includes Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation and Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation along with National River Conservation Directorate

  • Water in the country՚s three major rivers-the Indus, the Brahmaputra and the Ganga-has plummeted drastically. Central Water Commission՚s 2017 data shows that between 1984 - 85 and 2014 - 15 water in the Indus dropped by 27.78 billion cubic metres (bcm) , almost equal to the average water available in the Cauvery during this time. In the Brahmaputra it dropped by 95.56 bcm and in the Ganga by 15.5 bcm
  • Catchment area of the Indus reduced by 1 per cent, that of the Ganga by 2.7 per cent, and of the Brahmaputra by 0.6 per cent.
  • Ten of the 15 monitored river basins have registered a dip in their reservior water levels between May 2014 and 2019
  • THE COUNTRY՚s FIRST Five-Year Plan (1951 - 56) stressed on the importance of soil conservation and protecting soil from floods and erosion. It proposed the establishment of Central and state soil conservation boards
  • In 1956, the River Board Act was framed.
  • In 2013, the Ministry of Water Resources formulated the National Water Policy, calling for better governance, planning and development of water resources.
  • In 2015, draft National Water Framework Bill provided an over-arching national legal framework
  • Uttarakhand has six river catchments and 1,120 micro watersheds. Planning for these should start from micro watershed level

Balancing River Ecology

  • SARMA & ASEA Systems
  • The hydrological response and climate resiliency of the river basins change due to the variations in precipitation, temperature, topography, lithology, vegetation and other climatic characteristics
  • A river basin can be called degraded if the natural productivity, water availability and its capacity to absorb impacts of extreme events deteriorate from that of pre-industrial time
  • Optimal ecological management practices (emp) was developed, which aims to revert sediment yield, water yield and water quality parameters of a degraded basin by using ecologically sustainable and economically viable management practices
  • To estimate the affordable basin population of flood-prone cities, safe (sustainable accommodation through feedback evaluation) carrying capacity was developed. Sustainable approach of rainwater management and application, or SARMA system, helps in climate-resilient rainwater management using multi-utility ponds.
  • Assessment of settlement in eco-sensitive areas, or ASEA, assist in understanding settlements in the eco-sensitive wetlands and hills near or within urban areas

Nepal & Bihar Flash Floods

  • The delay of information sharing is alarming because every time Nepal has received heavy rains, Bihar has recorded flash floods. “In the recent past, this happened in 2008, 2011,2013, 2015 and 2017,”
  • The two countries have a circuitous communication channel that means the information is either critically delayed or unclear, and of little use to most riverbank communities in down-stream Bihar. This is when the Nepal government has a dedicated Water and Energy Commission Secretariat for trans-boundary water issues, established way back in 1981.
  • 6 districts in Bihar-East Champaran, Sitamarhi, Madhubani, Kishanganj, Araria and Sheohar- flooded due to incessant rainfall
Map location in East Champaran, Sitamarhi, Madhubani &Araria

WIPO

  • World Intellectual Property Organisation or WIPO, a UN body, the BRIP Database as it is called, offers the prospect of cleaning up online piracy globally by putting together a giant blacklist of websites that infringe copyright. The project is based on “follow-the-money” approach to copyright infringement which aims to choke the flow of money to illegal website operators.
  • WIPO describes its BRIP Database as a secure, access-controlled online platform, to which authorised agencies in wipo member-states may upload lists of websites which deliberately facilitate the infringement of copyright

CSIRPR

  • Twins Lulu and Nana were born famous. They are the pseudonyms of the world՚s first genetically edited babies. Chinese scientist He Jiankui edited gene CCR5 that codes for a protein which HIV uses to enter cell) -a biophysicist at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China-announced the result of his experiment on November 26,2018 in an exclusive interview to the Associated Press. The experiment using the simple yet powerful technology CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats
  • CRISPR -Cas9 genome-editing systems are molecular machines that can target specific sections of DNA in the genome and cut both strands of the double helix molecule
  • Germline editing-introducing heritable changes into human sperm, egg, or embryos to make genetically altered children
  • CRISPR mechanism observed for the first time by Japanese scientists at Osaka University in 1987
  • The young Chinese American biochemist Feng Zhang, one of the inventors of crispr, called for a global moratorium on germline gene editing, a day after Jiankui announced the result of his experiment
  • Chinese scientist Jiankui might have inadvertently shortened the life expectancy of the twin sisters in an attempt to make them resistant to H

Iatrogenics is when a treatment causes more harm than benefit. As iatros means healer in Greek, the word means “caused by the healer” . If the patient is close to death, all speculative treatments should be encouraged-no holds barred. Conversely, if the patient is near healthy, then Mother Nature should be the doctor.

  • 2018- USPTO granted a team of UC Berkeley researchers the university՚s first-ever patents related to CRISPR gene editing-one patent that covers the use of CRISPR-Cas9 to edit single-stranded RNA, and a second patent that covers the use of CRISPR-Cas9 for editing genome regions of 10 to 15 nucleotides long
  • Twins Lulu and Nana were born famous. They are the pseudonyms of the world՚s first genetically edited babies. Chinese scientist He Jiankui edited gene CCR5 that codes for a protein which HIV uses to enter cell) -a biophysicist at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China-announced the result of his experiment on November 26,2018 in an exclusive interview to the Associated Press. The experiment using the simple yet powerful technology CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats
  • CRISPR -Cas9 genome-editing systems are molecular machines that can target specific sections of DNA in the genome and cut both strands of the double helix molecule
  • Germline editing-introducing heritable changes into human sperm, egg, or embryos to make genetically altered children
  • CRISPR mechanism observed for the first time by Japanese scientists at Osaka University in 1987
  • The young Chinese American biochemist Feng Zhang, one of the inventors of crispr, called for a global moratorium on germline gene editing, a day after Jiankui announced the result of his experiment
  • Chinese scientist Jiankui might have inadvertently shortened the life expectancy of the twin sisters in an attempt to make them resistant to HIV

Iatrogenics is when a treatment causes more harm than benefit. As iatros means healer in Greek, the word means “caused by the healer” . If the patient is close to death, all speculative treatments should be encouraged-no holds barred. Conversely, if the patient is near healthy, then Mother Nature should be the doctor.

  • 2018- USPTO granted a team of UC Berkeley researchers the university՚s first-ever patents related to CRISPR gene editing-one patent that covers the use of CRISPR-Cas9 to edit single-stranded RNA, and a second patent that covers the use of CRISPR-Cas9 for editing genome regions of 10 to 15 nucleotides long

MCQs

  • Khamen akhaba
  • BRIP Database
  • SARMA system & ASEA
  • Konyak tribe of Nagaland
  • Ministry of Jal Shakti
  • Iatrogenics
  • Humans move about 156 million tonnes of rock and soil each day - mining
  • In Japan, for instance, in the next six to eight years, 40 per cent of farmers will quit farming. In fact, the Japanese government has embarked on a massive plan to encourage people below 45 to become farmers. India - According to Census 2011, every day 2,000 people give up farming. The income of a farmer is around one-fifth of a non-farmer.
  • Khamen akhaba Solanum aethopicum or khamen akhabi, as most Manipuris refer to it, is a variety of brinjal khamen means brinjal in Manipuri - small brinjal of amla size used for indigenous medicine to treat asthma, allergic rhinitis, nasal catarrh, skin infections, swollen joints and in weight reduction medicines
  • The US $ 1.7 billion Mumbai coastal road project is one of the most expensive infrastructure development projects stretching 35.6 km and connecting the entire western coast of Mumbai city. The project aims to create 90 hectares of land by reclaiming the inter-tidal western coast of the city՚s shoreline. It will destroy ecology. MOEFCC - it will reduce commuting time by 70 per cent and fuel saving per day of about 34 per cent. It says it will also reduce carbon footprint by 1,826 tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum.
  • The Deccan Plateau has been traced to the Mesozoic times-60 to 68 million years ago-and this is the natural heritage of Mumbai՚s rocky shore. Here, about 340 documented inter-tidal marine life species have been identified. Species like sea cucumbers, Gorgonians and corals, which receive protection under the Schedule 1 species of the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, are found here.

Examrace Team at Sep 3, 2021