Global Water Crisis and Local Community Antidotes

The Kathir Times has published my new article as titled above, the following are the concluding paras of the article:

"Though, India’s Niti Aayog’s Reports on Water Management has been strongly emphasizing the need for local community-led intervention for rejuvenation of bodies and creating a new one wherever feasible. However, it did not spell out the roadmap for financing and enabling the local community-led organizations across the country.

During the last few years, there have been several community-based interventions for rejuvenation of water bodies in Tamil Nadu which have helped to increase access to water for not just drinking but also for irrigation and other utilities. The efforts of Siruthuli, an NGO working last 16 years in reviving several water bodies in the Coimbatore district. Similarly, the efforts of the Olirum Erodu Foundation and Erodai Trust in Erode district, Environmentalist Foundation of India in Chennai, People’s Forum in Salem, Vettri Trust in Tiruppur and more recently the Olirum Krishnagiri Foundation in Krishnagiri have all done tremendous works to improve the groundwater table.

Moreover, the Madurai based Dhan Foundation has been pioneering the water management systems covering 2000 tanks and104 watersheds across all south Indian states in the last two decades. The community-based approaches are more sustainable for improving access to water for all segments by improving the groundwater table. Further, these models of community-led rejuvenation of water bodies were effectively stakeholders driven involving the local community, farmers, philanthropists and close coordination with government officials. We need to scale up these models across the States and country to effectively implement the water conservation intervention to improve the groundwater tables." 

Prof Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012)

By this time, many of you might have already read the sad news of passing away of a great classical liberal economist and the only Noble Prize winner in Economics so far. I am talking about Prof Elinor Ostrom. 

Here are some interesting introspects which enriches our ignorance.

In 2011 interview with NDVT she said not something new but an important aspect which otherwise gets credits of take always granted.

• I urge people to respect the indigenous people. In terms of health knowledge, there is a lot of indigenous knowledge about herbs and other things that work for illness and how to manage illness in an effective way. But we also find that sometimes indigenous knowledge is wrong and as we do tough science, we say “no, that’s wrong”. What I object to is the presumption that the government officials have got all the knowledge and locals have none.

There are many obituary's on Prof Ostrom. Read some of these here, here, here, here. Finally, her last article published is here.

Godscience

"Hindu thought was inclusive; the healer Charaka, the astronomer Aryabhatta and the mathematician Brahmagupta were as much part of the Vedic ethos as Agastya. The great Bhaskara—whose work on the calculus predates Newton—was taught math by an astrologer. His thesis, the Siddhānta Shiromani, is not just about arithmetic and algebra, but also covers planets and spheres—the fundamentals of astrology. From antiquity, cosmic mysteries were part of Hindu science: architecture has a spiritual aspect, like the Thachu Sastram of Kerala; so does Ayurveda, that celebrates the animistic aspects of botany and the arcana of planetary influences. Divinity wasn’t segmented: science, mythology, mysticism and mathematics together made up God."

Economics in Garlic

Vir Sanghvi writes in the HT about the heaven of garlic which I once use to eat like food because of taste or smell. “There’s a restaurant in London’s Soho called Garlic And Shots which is frequented by strangely dressed people in chains and leather trousers. The food itself is rubbish but the restaurant gets by because it goes on and on about how it puts garlic in everything. There are garlic cocktails, garlic fish, garlic meat, garlic sauce etc etc. I doubt very much if anyone actually likes the food but the idea of eating so much garlic seems to give white people a decidedly sexual thrill”.