A World Without Water

As less and less water is available, you have yet another problem being added and that is the problem of privatization. There are companies now saying why don’t we bottle it, mine it, divert it, sell it, commodify it. That greed of privatization, I believe, will be much worse than climate change and everything else that has left us with the water crisis. The world is running out of its most precious resource. True Vision’s timely film tells of the personal tragedies behind the mounting privatisation of water supplies.

More than a billion people across the globe don’t have access to safe water. Every day 3900 children die as a result of insufficient or unclean water supplies. The situation can only get worse as water gets evermore scarce.

Watch the full documentary now

Solve Water And Sanitation Challenges.

We need  an active participation of  general public  , local leaders from across the globe. who are working in solidarity so everyone can access to  safe water and sanitation . 

The United Nations Development Programme UNDP.. has facilitated the formation of a global platform to unite local actors to solve water and sanitation challenges, including encouraging water authorities in developed countries to support the improvement of services in poorer regions through donations.

The Global Water Solidarity Platform was launched on Wednesday at the World Water Forum in Marseille, France, where 20,000 participants from the private, public and non-profit sectors gathered this week to address global water challenges.

UNDP led a group of 25 institutions, including local, regional and national authorities, international and multilateral organizations, water operators, non-governmental and private organizations, as well as prominent figures to assess, design and constitute the new international tool to promote decentralized cooperation in water and sanitation.

“This UNDP initiative is important because 11 per cent of the planet’s population still lacks access to potable water, and 2.5 billion people do not have adequate sanitation services.

Through the Platform, which is supported by the Governments of France and Switzerland, municipal water authorities in developed countries can, for example, take direct action to support the improvement of water and sanitation services in developing nations by contributing one per cent of their revenue or budgets.
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An app to fight sanitation problems

Six teams of IT experts and professors supported by the Water and Sanitation Program presented mobile applications or 'Apps' that can help support consumers and governments surmounting the water and sanitation problems in India. The event took place at Vigyan Bhawan on Tuesday.

The prototypes were presented to private firms such as Nokia, Vodafone and Accenture.

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The waterhackthon event is one of many promoted by the World Bank and its partners. Its aim is to promote the use of ICT tools in solving water issues. The project has come up with suggested solutions that are beyond the imagination of most people.

Each of the six teams made their presentations and also emphasized the importance of serving the poor and making the applications simple to use.

For example, Team PeeQ demonstrated their application that helps mobile phone users to help locate the closest public loo.

US-based Tribal Technologies demonstrated how schools in Orissa have been provided with a cheap android phone that records students school attendance data and gives them points for attendance.

Parents, in turn, can redeem these points for food like dal and rice.

During the event, the government presented its latest mobile initiatives in e-governance and mobile technology.

Participants noted that mobile technology is just one aspect of e-governance, and data on water quality and sanitation should be made available to people openly.

"For hackers, this is a great opportunity to get information about government initiatives, like the government app store and other interactive ways to participate in better water supply and sanitation," said Yashas Shetty of the hacking team Jugaad Sensors.

"One aspect slowing down development of e-governance is the current procurement process, which is not flexible enough for new inventions," claimed Partha Sarthi Sen Sharma, Director of the Uttar Pradesh-based Midday Meal Authority.

"We already have the prototypes. We have the private sector to help us create a market for the solutions. And, we have the Government of India hungry for mobile solutions. Now, we are finally all gathered around the same table. So, this is a good start for discussions," said Shetty, whose team has created a kit for water quality testing and monitoring.

Source:- http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-02-21/computing/31082344_1_mobile-solutions-mobile-applications-e-governance

(Six teams of IT experts and professors supported by the Water and Sanitation Program presented mobile applications or 'Apps'.)

Why are toilets low priority in India?

No amount of stink, or raising one to correct it, would work quick enough to change the order of things. Toilets, you see, are our least priority

Anyone who had travelled by trains in India [ Images ] does not have to be told of the toilet-effect. It is the stench that permeates the coaches, the mess within the toilets which are places with a hole in the floor over which a commode or a squat pan is placed. It lacks three elements: a proper design, enough water to service it, and proper user-habits.

Now, it transpires, these toilets on Indian Railway coaches also do damage to the rail tracks and they very coaches on which they are housed as a passenger amenity. The human excrement falls on to the tracks and corrodes the tracks. They splatter the coaches' undercarriages and maintenance crews shy away from servicing those parts.

Thus, they make train travel unsafe. A committee of rail safety headed by nuclear scientist Anil Kakodkar has suggested that railways opt for a new design which contains the human waste from falling on the tracks and messing with the undercarriages. If done, they would also save the expense of having to replace the tracks and rolling stocks to sustain safety.

It is not that the railways are unaware of the issues of toilets, their designs and even implications for, curiously -- one did not expect it then, and one does not believe it now -- during Lalu Yadav's [ Images ] tenure as railway minister, it was decided to install eco-toilets which made for better hygiene. A large proportion of as many as 9,000 trains were to have been fitted by now. They only sat on their haunches.

That is quite a stink.

Had this been done, Kakodkar and his team would have only asked for speeding up their installation, not for change in design. Apparently nothing visible has been done on it since Lalu Yadav's announcement in 2008. One of the proposed designs then was from railways' own research designs and standards organisation which has excreta being collected in a tank, where it is broken down in about a week's time by enzymes. The liquid part is treated with chlorine prior to being let out.

The other was a zero-discharge design from IIT-Kanpur which recycles fluids for flushing and does not deposit the muck on the tracks.

But a word about how the damage occurs to the tracks and the undercarriages: Kakodkar was quoted in the Indian Express, the only newspaper to take it seriously enough, was that the pH content of the human excrement reduced the life span of the 1.1 lakh km long tracks. Likewise, the splatter affected some 43,000 coaches that now ply. pH is a measure in chemistry. If it is less than 7, it is acidic. If more than 7, it indicates alkalinity. Either can impinge on the tracks, clips and liners which hold them together for a train to safely pass over.

We do not know what priority the cash-strapped railways would now assign this issue. It has not been an issue so far for the only design changes we see now, at least in the air-conditioned coaches is the provision of a hand-held shower and sometimes a mug chained to the wall to prevent theft, some dispensers without soap in them. During the train's journey, the toilets are not cleaned by staff stationed at various junctions. Water is sometimes missing.

What about the conditions in unreserved coaches which are overcrowded unlike the reserved ones? One can well imagine it and not be wrong. Many a train in India take over 24 hours to complete a journey and surely, even the unwashed majority who use open spaces for their nature's call would find it choking but are uncomplaining. For, in India, toilets are a very low priority.

That explains why we have more cell phones in India than toilets as pointed out by UNICEF and why Indian women want cell phones and not toilets, as Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh [ Images ] has been saying. Probably, because, like the ones on the Indian Railways, both on trains and at stations, the toilets don't seem to work.  That is why half the population are without access to toilets; in plain numbers, shockingly, over half a billion.

The government has been making efforts of a token kind: provide Rs 3,000 per toilet if you don't have one but want to when it actually costs thrice that and not all Indian are in the affording class here. And those who have had a toilet installed have also converted it for different uses like storage of agricultural implements, a storeroom for the home and in some rare cases in Marathwada, into places of worship.

Along with absence of toilets, the other is the issue of water and good hand-washing practices. The India Human Development Report 2011 was blunt with the obvious: "Open defecation is a serious threat to health and nutritional status, in addition to the safety of women and girls." And, "The situation is more dismal in rural areas where more than 75 per cent households do not have toilet facilities. Even if a single household is defecating in the open, that household can be a source of diarrhoea for all households," in the proximity of the village it said.

Toilet training an entire nation is stupendous where resources, including the all-critical water to ensure even good hand-cleaning practices to avoid contamination, are hard to come by. Maharashtra [ Images ], said to be one of the better states with the highest number of villages which abandoned open defecation is still a modest achievement. The best-achiever state has only 9,082 villages out of 27,928 gram panchayats which use toilets, not open spaces.

Obviously, there are worse states. Karnataka's [ Images ] former advocate general had to file a PIL in the high court asking for an end to scavenging where one is employed to clean up and carry away another's discharge. Despite a law, the Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines Prohibition Act 1993, that was in place he had to ask for its enforcement. But then, it is on paper for even urban centres have no drains, people use sceptic tanks to collect the human waste which in turn is again manually cleaned.

Even, as in Maharashtra, good intentions have not met with appropriate support from those who stand to benefit. Majority of toilets those built within the homes or as an adjunct to it in the villages with government aid were either converted into spare storage areas for keeping farm implements or the overload from tiny homes. It happened in Latur earthquake-hit areas as it did in other places where subsidies in crores of rupees were doled out to encourage toilets to end open defecation.

It just seems that we have a long way to go though no one is asking for toilets smelling of lavender. In Mumbai [ Images ], women who have a high rate of urinary tract infection would be happy with mere clean ones. No amount of stink, or raising one to correct it, would work quick enough to change the order of things.

Why, you can even unknowing tread upon it on an Indian street. And fear it happening again.

Toilets, you see, are our least priority.

Mahesh Vijapurkar is a Thane-based commentator on public affairs.

Mahesh Vijapurkar

Source:- http://www.rediff.com/news/column/why-are-toilets-low-priority-in-india/20120229.htm

India's hunger 'shame': 3,000 children die every day, despite economic growth

Severely malnourished girl Rajni, 2, is weighed by health workers in Madhya Pradesh, India, February 1.

By Reuters

Crying as she is put on an electronic scale, two-year-old Rajini's naked shriveled frame casts a dark shadow over a rising India, where millions of children have little to eat.

The children are scrawny, listless and sick in this run-down nutrition clinic in central India with its intermittent power supply. If they survive they will grow up shorter, weaker and less smart than their better-fed peers.

Rajini weighs 5 kg (11 lb), about half of what she should.

"She's as light as a leaf, this can't be good," says her grandmother, Sushila Devi, poking her rib-protruding stomach in the clinic in Shivpuri district in Madhya Pradesh state.

Almost as shocking as India's high prevalence of child malnutrition is the country's failure to reduce it, despite the economy tripling between 1990 and 2005 to become Asia's third largest and annual per capita income rising to $489 from $96.

1 in 4 children malnourished, global report says

A government-supported survey last month said 42 percent of children under five are underweight - almost double that of sub-Saharan Africa - compared to 43 percent five years ago.

The statistic - which means 3,000 children dying daily due to illnesses related to poor diets - led Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to admit malnutrition was "a national shame" and was putting the health of the nation in jeopardy.

"It is a national shame. Child nutrition is a marker of the many things that are not going right for the poor of India," said Purnima Menon, research fellow on poverty, health and nutrition at the Institute of Food Policy Research Institute.

India's efforts to reduce the number of undernourished kids have been largely hampered by blighting poverty where many cannot afford the amount and types of food they need.

Adnan Abidi / Reuters

Women hold their severely malnourished children as they stand outside the Nutritional Rehabilitation Centre of Shivpuri, Madhya Pradesh, India, February 1.

Poor hygiene, low public health spending and little education and awareness have not helped. Age-old customs discriminating against women such as child marriage have also contributed, but are far harder to tackle, say experts.

In addition, shoddy management of food stocks, subsidized carbohydrate-rich food that fuel and fill the poor rather than truly nourishing them and real shortages in its poorest states have worsened the problem.

At the Shivpuri clinic, health worker Rekha Singh Chauhan tends to emaciated young children in a ward with a ganglion of electrical wires running cross its paint-chipped walls.

"We only have a handful to take care of now, but come April, the cases will shoot up," says Chauhan, adding that diseases such as diarrhea and malaria will cause an influx of sick underweight children with the onset of summer.

"The situation becomes bad. Three children are made to share a bed and many have to sleep on the floor."

That picture jars with an India clocking enviable 8-9 percent growth over the last five years that has put money in the pockets of millions of its people and fuelled demand for everything from cars and computers to clothes and fancy homes.

It has also catapulted the country onto the world stage, boosting its claim for a bigger role on forums such as the U.N. Security Council. This month, it moved closer to buying new fighter jets worth a whopping $15 billion.

Adnan Abidi / Reuters

Four-month-old Vishakha, who weighs 2.3 kg (5 lbs) and suffers from severe malnutrition, rests on a bed next to her mother at the Nutritional Rehabilitation Centre, Shivpuri, Madhya Pradesh, India on February 1.

Yet while the urban middle classes dine in swanky shopping malls where eateries offer everything from sushi to burritos, millions of children are dying due to a lack of food.

Last month's report by the Indian charity Naandi Foundation, the first comprehensive data since a 2005/6 study, said India's "nutrition crisis" is an attributable cause for up to half of all child deaths.

Yet India's public spending on health, estimated at 1.2 percent of its GDP in 2009, is among the lowest in the world.

Remembering India's first woman photojournalist

"This isn't a quick-fix that we're looking at here, it's not a magic bullet," said Jasmine Whitbread, CEO of Save the Children International.

"Not just in India, but in countries around the world, we know that you can't just rely on trickle down. There have to be policies in place, there have got to be political choices that prioritize malnutrition."

In Shivpuri, an impoverished tribal-dominated district in Madhya Pradesh state, that reality is on full display.

The region's malnutrition level for children under five matches the national average, but child mortality rates are worse at 103 deaths per 1,000. The national average is 66 deaths per 1,000, according to U.N. children's agency, Unicef.

Most of the children here are from India's most marginalized and poorest communities, such as tribals and lower castes where literacy is poor and poverty high.

Their mothers are themselves often undernourished, forced into early marriage when they reach puberty, and give birth to underweight babies with weak immune systems.

Illiteracy or lack of awareness takes its toll as well. These mothers do not breastfeed, offering buffalo milk and contaminated water instead and making their children prone to illnesses like diarrhea, which prevents nutrient absorption.

Mostly living on less than $2 a day, these families can hardly afford anything beyond wheat chapatis that are devoid of much-needed protein and other nutrients.

Soapy milk, toxic apples: food safety in India

India's neglect of its young - 48 percent are stunted, 20 percent wasted and 70 percent anemic - will have serious repercussions. The World Bank says malnutrition in the poorest countries slashes around 3 percent from annual economic growth.

In comparison, neighboring China has already achieved its target on malnutrition and under-five child mortality goals as its economic growth has been more broad-based, focusing on health, sanitation and small holder production.

While India has several schemes already running to battle malnutrition, the Indian government is now vaunting a multi-billion-dollar food subsidy program as a possible solution.

But the Food Security Bill, which guarantees cut-price rice and wheat to 63.5 percent of the population may be more a political gimmick, experts worry, than about providing nutritious food to those who need it most.

"The Food Security Bill is a very good development, but it is a food security bill, not a nutrition security bill," said Lawrence Haddad, director of the U.K.-based Institute of Development Studies.

For the children at Shivpuri's nutrition centre, government plans mean little unless they put enough of the right food in their stomachs.

"You see her arms? They are almost the width of my thumb," says Jharna, as she carried her limp, emaciated one-year-old grand-daughter, Sakshi, into the clinic. "She is too weak. She can't even sit by herself."

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Source:- http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/16/10424930-indias-hunger-shame-3000-children-die-every-day-despite-economic-growth

Microsoft founder Bill Gates urges digital revolution against hunger

Microsoft founder Bill Gates on Thursday called for a "digital revolution" to alleviate world hunger by increasing agricultural productivity through satellites and genetically-engineered seed varieties. 

"We have to think hard about how to start taking advantage of the digital revolution that is driving innovation including in farming," the US billionaire philanthropist said in a speech at the UN rural poverty agency IFAD in Rome. 

"If you care about the poorest, you care about agriculture. We believe that it's possible for small farmers to double and in some cases even triple their yields in the next 20 years while preserving the land," Gates said. 

He gave as one example of innovation the genetic sequencing that allows cassava farmers in Africa to predict how individual seedlings will perform, shortening the time it takes to develop a new variety from 10 years to two. 

Another key development is the use of satellite technology developed by defence departments to document data about individual fields, as well as information videos of farmers discussing best practices to help others. "If we don't do this, we'll have a digital divide in agriculture," he said. 

Gates also defended the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the developing world and large-scale farm land investments by foreign states in the developing world, both highly controversial issues in the aid community. 

"You should go out and talk to people growing rice and say do they mind that it was created in a laboratory when their child has enough to eat?" he told reporters at a small media roundtable after his speech. "The change in the way mankind lives over the last several hundred years is based on adoption of innovative practices and we simply haven't done enough for those in the greatest need to bring these things," he said. 

On the issue of land investments that are referred to by their critics as "land grabbing", he said: "It's not actually possible to grab the land. People don't put it on boats and take it back to the Middle East. 

"If we could have clear guidelines there could be more land deals and overall it could be very beneficial... The truth is the person who is most at risk on a land deal is the person who is putting the money in." 

Gates also unveiled $200 million (150 million euros) in new grants from his foundation to finance research on a new type of drought-resistant maize, a vaccine to help livestock farmers and a project for training farmers. 

"Investments in agriculture are the best weapons against hunger and poverty," he said, adding that his charitable foundation had committed $2.0 billion for farmers and was working on seven crops and one livestock vaccine. 

Gates called for a new system of "public scorecards" for developing countries and UN food agencies that would measure things like agricultural productivity, the ability to feed families and farmer education systems. "It's something that can be pulled together over the next year," he said. 

"When I meet with an African leader, I'd love to have that report card. I have a report card for health.... Without the scorecards, the donors tend to fund fad-oriented, short-term things," he told reporters. 

The technology pioneer also criticised the work of the UN food agencies in Rome: the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the World Food Programme(WFP) and the International Fund for Agriculture and Development (IFAD). 

He said the current food and farming aid system was "outdated and somewhat inefficient" with a lot of "duplication." For these organisations to go digital will take "a lot of time," he said. 

Asked about the need for wider reforms of capitalism to help the poor, he said: "How do you get rid of its excesses, including the finance people who are paid these huge salaries, without hurting the beneficial things?" 

He added: "I wish those Wall Street traders would have gone... and worked on maize and used their mathematical models to look at phenotype versus genotype. "It's clearly imperfect but it's the best system we have."



Source:- http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international-business/microsoft-founder-bill-gates-urges-digital-revolution-against-hunger/articleshow/12008404.cms?curpg=2