by admin | May 25, 2021 | Entrepreneurship, Markets, News, Social Entrepreneur, Technology
By Sirshendu Panth,
Kolkata : Setting up of a Groundwater Mission can help develop an action plan for tackling problems like arsenic and fluoride pollution, storage anomalies and the alarming dwindling of freshwater resources that plague the South Asian region, a new book edited and partly written by an IIT don and other experts contends.
The mission, on the lines of the Drinking Water Mission, could play a pivotal role in formulating and implementing an initial plan based on feedback received from key working groups on groundwater, says Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur (IIT-Kgp) Associate Professor Abhijit Mukherjee, the editor of the soon-to-be-published “Groundwater of South Asia”.
“The working groups would be on aquifer mapping and delineation, recharge systems and well-use efficiencies, groundwater-power co-management, demand management of aquifers and on groundwater legislation,” suggests the book, partly authored by Mukherjee and his students, and partly by invited stalwarts across the globe who have worked in South Asia.
Attached to the Department of Geology & Geophysics in the institute’s School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Mukherjee has worked in different parts of South Asia, looking at groundwater issues for almost two decades.
The South Asian region, comprising Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, is the world’s most populous and densely-populated region. It occupies approximately four per cent of the world’s land area but supports over 25 per cent of the global population.
Despite being drained by three of the world’s large river systems that discharge huge volumes of water, sediments and nutrients to the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal, almost half the water that enters the South Asian hydrologic system is dissipated by poorly understood and quantified processes.
“The region faces acute shortages of drinking water and other usable water, as it is witnessing rapid rise in water demand and change in societal water-use pattern because of accelerated urbanisation and change in lifestyles,” Mukherjee told IANS in an e-mail.
“Although South Asia is home to some of the highest-yielding aquifers of the world, the distribution of usable groundwater in the region is not uniform and there is a growing concern about the availability of safe water in many areas like wide portions of the Brahmaputra, Ganges and Indus basins due to presence of natural contaminants.
“Of these, the presence of elevated concentrations of arsenic and fluoride has been widely observed,” says the book, dwelling at length on arsenic pollution in the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Meghna and Kabul basin and fluoride pollution in the Indus basin.
“The distribution of arsenic concentrations within the basin may seem to be extremely heterogeneous and even patchy due to the integrated effect of the geomorphology, geology, hydrostratigraphy, depth, lithology (study of the general physical characteristics of rocks), bio-geochemical environment and anthropogenic (relating to, or resulting from the influence of human beings on nature) influences. Among the anthropogenic factors contributing to arsenic contaminations are ground-water abstractions, land use patterns, fertilisers and sewage,” says the book, while calling the arsenic contamination of groundwater in the Bengal Basin “the largest mass poisoning in human history.”
The 799-page book, divided into 44 chapters and published by Springer, also refers to extensive pumping of groundwater in the region, leading to lowering of the water table and enhanced inflow of oxygen-rich surface waters which “perturbs the redox state of the aquifers and may mobilise arsenic”.
The authors studied the groundwater storage (GWS) anomaly in the Indian subcontinent by using a combination of satellite and global land surface model-based outputs between 2003 and 2014, and observed “rapid declination” of GWS in northern and eastern regions of the subcontinent.
Mukherjee warned that the water crises might further aggravate with the predicted climate change and melting of the high-altitude glaciers that feed the hydrological system of South Asia.
“However, the existing knowledge is extremely heterogeneous. While some regions of these countries provide most studied natural groundwater system of the world, there is barely any knowledge existing from other areas… Also, the extent and effect of other emerging and unidentified groundwater contaminants like nitrate, pesticides, radiogens, antibiotics etc. are yet to be accounted for,” Mukherjee said.
The book also contains preambles of some of the themes written by globally eminent groundwater researchers like Cliff Voss of the US Geolgoical Survey, Matt Rodell from NASA, Science Director of the British Geolgoical Survey Martin Smith, AUS scientist Alan Fryar and eminent water economist Tushaar Shah.
(Sirshendu Panth can be contacted at s.panth@ians.in )
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate Jobs, Employment, Private Jobs
IIT Kharagpur
Kolkata : Offers were made to as many as 1,200 students at the end of phase one of the 2017-18 placement season at IIT Kharagpur — a 15 per cent jump from last year, a statement from the institute said on Thursday.
This placement season started with enrolment of 2,054 students which is the maximum at an individual Indian Institute of Technology.
“This is due to the wide variety of disciplines that are offered by IIT Kharagpur. The 1,200 offers are due to 200 companies that visited during the phase 1,” the statement said.
In a new trend this year, PSUs started visiting the campus during November, which is much before the actual placement session started.
The placements for Undergraduate (UG) students touched the 75 per cent mark which is an improvement of 12 per cent while the placements for Postgraduate (PG) students is at 38 per cent showing an improvement of 14 per cent compared to last year. B.Arch saw a jump of 20 per cent this year compared to the last.
“This year the Career Development Centre (CDC) has initiated a placement drive for PhDs graduating/graduated within two months and this gave a fruitful outcome with 26 PhDs getting placed across reputed teaching and research institutions,” the release added.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News
By Sahana Ghosh,
Kolkata : As floods ravage India and its neighbours, experts at IIT-Kharagpur (IIT-Kgp) say states with high forest cover are more likely to better cope with the damage caused.
In a study published in the journal Land Use Policy in July, researchers from the institute examined the impact of forest cover on flood damage in terms of human lives lost and population affected from 1998 to 2011 across all Indian states except Telangana, which came into existance only in 2014.
“The study findings indicate that for a majority of states, the presence of forest cover tends to protect human lives and reduce the adverse consequences of floods significantly,” PhD scholar Kasturi Bhattacharjee of IIT-Kgp’s Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, told IANS.
According to the analysis, the average number of lives lost is quite high in Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.
The states which have recorded a high number of people affected by floods include Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal and Uttarakhand.
Bhattacharjee said while for some states (such as West Bengal, Uttarakhand), the damage declined with increasing presence of forest cover during the study period, this did not apply to other states like Madhya Pradesh.
Madhya Pradesh, incidentally, is the state which has recorded the highest average forest cover at 76,294.07 sq. km. (24.75 per cent of its geographical area).
The average number of people affected and the number of human lives lost in the state during 1998-2011 were 802,687.5 and 26.14, respectively.
“For Madhya Pradesh, despite increasing forest cover, flood damage has increased. This could be linked to the percentage of forest cover and percentage of flood-prone area in terms of total geographical area of the state as well as the socio-economic parameters contributing to the state’s vulnerability,” Bhattacharjee explained.
On the other hand, Bihar registers the highest average number of lives lost and people affected (246.07 and 777,7357.14, respectively).
It has an average forest cover of 7,425.64 sq. km (0.08 per cent of its geographical area).
The cause of its high magnitude of devastation in floods may be due to the socio-economic backwardness, coupled with low forest cover, Bhattacharjee said.
States with a higher literacy rate tend to experience less flood damage.
“This suggests that as the awareness level of people increases, they are better prepared for floods and thereby the damage from floods reduces significantly. Also, it is often found that educated people tend to react faster during flood emergencies compared to their uneducated counterparts,” Bhattacharjee said.
Data for the analysis was culled from the Forest Survey of India (FSI) of the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, web portal www.indiastat.com and census reports for 1991, 2001 and 2011.
“Active involvement of local people in protection and management of forest resources is essential because state controlled forest management mechanism has failed in India,” said study co-author Bhagirath Behera, Associate Professor at IIT-Kgp’s Department of Humanities and Social Sciences.
The findings also have important policy implications for South Asian countries such as Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The study warns that if population growth is not controlled in low-lying inundation-prone zones, it is likely that the damage may increase in future, especially in flood-susceptible areas of India as well as other South Asian countries.
“To prevent flood damage, the need of the hour is to shift the focus from flood protection/relief to flood resilience/adaptation, as the majority of structural measures have failed in the past.
“Enhancing flood resilience/adaptive capacity by using non-structural measures such as afforestation drives is a way forward,” the experts note.
Lauding the study for establishing the link in a meaningful way, natural hazards/ecohazards and disaster management scientist Tuhin Ghosh raised questions on the impact on forests themselves.
“While minimising the loss on society, are forests being highly impacted in terms of their coverage, health, soil/water quality and ecosystem services?” Ghosh, Assistant Professor, Department of Oceanographic Studies, Jadavpur University, asked while speaking to IANS.
Further, Ghosh said he is not really convinced that literacy can always indicate the level of awareness.
“My personal experience is that the better-off literate people are not in a position to act properly during a flood situation. In contrast, illiterate rural people know how to manage floods more efficiently,” he added.
(Sahana Ghosh can be contacted at sahana.g@ians.in)
—IANS
