Articles by Aarti Kelkar Khambete

The 2021-22 Union Budget announced the launch of the Jal Jeevan Mission (Urban), an ambitious project that aims to provide potable tap water supply to 2.86 crore households by 2024. How will this work out for urban India? Urban India is fast hurtling towards a major water crisis in the years to come. A 2020 report by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has projected that 30 Indian cities will face a ‘grave water risk’ by 2050 due to overcrowding in cities. A Niti Aayog report too had predicted that 21 Indian cities including New Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad will run out of…

Climate change is leading to a rise in extreme events the world over, and developing countries such as India have been experiencing not only higher death rates but also greater economic impacts due to natural hazards. Urban areas in India have been found to be particularly vulnerable to floods due to unplanned developmental activities, change in land use patterns, overcrowding as well as increase in natural hazards such as rise in sea levels, storms and cyclones. This paper 'Investigation of role of retention storage in tanks (small water bodies) on future urban flooding: A case study of Chennai city, India'…

Urban growth and expansion of cities is increasing the demand for land and water, increasing pressure on resources available not only in urban, but also in peri-urban areas. State policies often use peri-urban spaces and resources to meet the needs of urban populations; for instance, they use grazing lands for urban infrastructure, sewerage and water treatment plants or for special economic zones. Water is another resource that continues to be scarce in urban areas because of the growing population and competing domestic and industrial water needs. Public infrastructure and utility services are unable to keep pace with the growing water…

River Mutha, the pride of Pune, lovingly called 'Muthai' or 'mother Mutha', is dying a slow death, thanks to the rapidly urbanising city which is depositing huge amounts of untreated sewage and dirt in its water. The pollution of the river is consistently rising. The situation is so bad that the river has been declared dead at many stretches. The high level of contamination of water from untreated sewage and industrial wastes has led to the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in its water. While a large number of activists, environmentalists and citizens have been drawing people’s attention towards the sad state of…

Pune has a story similar to many other cities in India that grew exponentially without much warning. The unplanned development hit the water resources badly, increasing the city’s dependence on groundwater. Now, the city experiences water scarcity every year, even when the monsoons have been plentiful. Although the authorities have assured the citizens of adequate water storage in the dams and fewer water cuts this year, long-term, sustainable solutions still evade all political discourses. The good news, however, is that the citizens and the housing societies have now started coming forward to work around the problem and advocate changes at…

WhatsApp is huge in India. It reaches the common man much more than Facebook or Twitter does in India. It’s so big that government authorities in India use WhatsApp for information dissemination or even to get information. For a lot of people in India, WhatsApp has become the window to the Internet. Many in the country now use WhatsApp to get news. Most of them get this news while being part of a big group as ‘forwards’. This makes it a rich medium for any controversial news to go viral. Also a good medium for scammers. Recently, the prime minister of India mentioned…