Monsoon
August 4 2009
It’s finally fully here. Mausim – season, monsoon – rains and you find it in the breeze today. Distinctly from the South West sending the clouds scurrying across the sky the sound and light show follows and the mosquitoes are blown away. This is not the season of the sun, disappearing of course behind the clouds. Termites take wing and fly , snakes appear on the landscape, power cuts are the norm with even a little bit of rain and vodka is at its tastiest. The constant whirr of the crickets , the flying insects inside the house and clothes refusing to dry. Rainwater in my tank and my open well brimmeth over. Season to plant trees and offset carbon, i go for the pongaemia. Red earth on my shoes and Chyna – the dog- needs a blanket now to sleep upon, the floor is damp and cold. The rains are upon us and all is well with the world,for now.

http://www.livemint.com/2008/08/14010747/Chitra-Vishwanath.html

Chitra Vishwanath works only with sustainable technologies and has built a couple of hundred mud buildings in and around Bangalore
I think
In a time of environmental crisis, it is criminal to use any material for building other than what is available on your own site. Mud is one such material, especially in Bangalore.
(For a discussion on sustainable architecture with Chitra Vishwanath click below)
The local mud makes for good stabilized mud blocks for walls and roofs.
We can
All you need to do is introduce a basement into the design, digging for which will provide all the mud.
You must, of course, provide adequate overhangs (roof projections) to prevent running water hitting and flowing on the surface of the wall, and a high plinth.
The blocks must be adequately stabilized (with cement or other binders), and should have a specified weight per unit of density. Any good mason can then build with these mud blocks.
Mud can be in used in several other ways, too—cob, rammed earth, and wattle-and-daub walls, for instance—depending on considerations of desired aesthetic, available skill sets and local climate.

Women we love
Nirmala Ravindran
February 27, 2009

CHITRA VISHWANATH

Architect Chitra Vishwanath, would rather show you her work than talk about it. Environmentally-sound and cost-effective are the key words that describe her work.

A pioneer in the field long before these phrases became fashionable, her own house stands on 1500 sq ft of land on the outskirts of Bangalore as a model of her beliefs. Her home does not use air conditioning, or even fans, the walls are unplastered and made of mud bricks created on the site.

Chitra Vishwanath built a home that is environmentally sound and cost-effective—with no ACs, no fans and unplastered walls made of mud bricks. Built on various levels, it has a 1,000 sq ft vegetable garden.
With a multitude of skylights and open passages, the airy house is the perfect example of energy conservation. “We’ve done a lot of things to our home—things we cannot do in a client’s house. It’s nice to be able to show the possibilities.”

Eco-friendliness cannot be a fashion statement, she believes. It has to be a way of life. Along with her husband, Vishwanath, who is a civil engineer and rainwater harvesting expert, Chitra has created much-lauded homes and buildings across the country. Putting the money where their mouth is, the Vishwanaths have constantly worked at their home, making it a laboratory of change, and ensuring that the aesthetics are in place.

The composite pit in the compound handles the organic waste and garbage from the house. Solar panels to heat water, water harvesting takes care of more than 70 per cent of the water requirements of the house and Chitra uses solar cookers to make her rice and dal.

In addition, she says, “We have a toilet that separates the solid and liquid matter, and the water can be recycled into the ground.” Chitra has ensured that most, if not all, of their needs are met by optimum utilisation.

But nothing prepares you for the surprise of seeing vegetables and rice being grown on the terrace, proving that a little thought and ideology can work wonders. “It’s not a project that we can finish. We are constantly looking for new ways to improve our own thinking and ideas and hopefully help in the larger plan of conservation.”

Source: http://www.indianexpress.com/story/29112._.html

‘I was always Leftist. Economic reforms made me completely Marxist’
Mani Shankar Aiyar
A few weeks ago the newspapers reported that the number of Indian billionaires had exceeded the number of billionaires in Japan, and there was a considerable amount of self-congratulation on this. I understand from P. Sainath that we rank eighth in the world in the number of our millionaires. And we stand 126th on the Human Development Index. I am glad to report that last year we were 127th.

At this very fast rate of growth that we are now showing, we moved up from 127th to 126th position. This is the paradigm of our development process. In a democracy, every five years the masses determine who will rule this country. And they showed dramatically in the last elections that they knew how to keep their counsel and show who they wanted. We, my party and I, were the beneficiaries and we formed the government. Every five years, it is the masses who determine who will form the government. And in between those five years the classes determine what that government will do.

In determining what that government will do, the CII has played an extremely important role. I am not surprised, as that is its job. It represents industry, and therefore it argues for the interests of the industry. Industry has been enormously benefited by the processes of economic reform that we have seen in this country over the last 15 years or so. But the benefits of these reforms have gone so disproportionately to those who are the most passionate advocates of reforms that every five years we are given a slap in the face for having done what the CII regards as self-evidently the right thing for this country.

It is a sustainable economic proposition, because our numbers are so vast, that there are perhaps 10 million Indians who are just as rich as the richest equivalent segment anywhere in the world or in any group of countries. There are about fifty million Indians who really are extraordinarily well off. That’s the population of the UK.

But if you look at the 700 million Indians who are either not in the market or barely in the market, then the impact of the economic reforms process, which is so lauded by the CII, makes virtually no difference to their lives. That is why there is a complete disjunct between what the democratic processes are trying for in the short run and what those who have made an enormous success of our achievements in the last fifteen years deem to be, at least in the short run, their own requirements.

So when you talk of a nine point two per cent growth rate, it becomes a statistical abstraction: 0.2 per cent of our people are growing at 9.92 per cent per annum. But there is a very large number, I don’t know how many, whose growth rate is perhaps down to 0.2 per cent. But certainly, the number of those who are at the lower end of the growth sector is very much larger than those who are at the higher end.

Yet what happens when you have the budget? As an absolute ritual every finance minister (my colleague Chidambaram is no exception) will devote the first four or five pages of his budget speech to the bulk of India and there will then be several pages, including whole of part B, which deals perhaps with one or two per cent of our population. Almost the entire discussion that takes place at CII or CII-like forums, will be about Part B rather than Part A.

There are comfort levels that you get from statistics — for instance, suddenly Arun Shourie, announcing in the NDA government that our poverty rates have fallen from 35 per cent to 22 per cent. He did it by changing the basis on which you estimate poverty. You cannot compare apples and oranges. The next national sample survey has shown that our poverty levels have actually increased. Are we going to be mesmerised by these statistics or understand that 700 million of our people are poor?

So we have an Indira Awaas Yojana which will ensure that there will be a ‘jhuggi’ for every Indian round about the year 2200. We have the PM Gram Sadak Yojana which was supposed to complete all the gram sadak in seven years — we are in the eighth year. And where we are told that the education of 1000 may be covered, who knows only the education of 500 will be covered. And if you happen to be a tribal in Arunachal, you are told that because of your social custom you are to live in one hut atop a hill, we can’t provide you a road.

I was always something of a leftist. But I became a complete Marxist only after the economic reforms. Because I see the extent to which the most important conception of Marx — that the relationship of any given class with the means of production determines the superstructure — holds.

This ugly choice is placed before the government. An unequal choice, because you have organised yourself to say what you want to say but the others are only able to organise themselves and that too without speaking to each other in the fifth year when the elections take place. That is why this expression anti-incumbency, although the Oxford Dictionary says that it is a word belonging to the English language, is a peculiarly Indian phenomenon. Because everything that goes in the name of good governance like the economic reforms either does not touch the life of people or affect them at all.

We have seen what happened at Nandigram, we have seen what was happening at Singur and we have these propositions that say that SEZs are going to come and lakhs of hectares are going to be utilised for the good of the country. For what’s the syndrome in all this, it’s still ‘do bigha zameen’. The chap says that I want my one bigha of zameen to be reinstated, but you offer double the compensation and “baad mein dekha jayega”. You go to Hirakud, which is where Jawaharlal Nehru actually used the expression modern temples of India, and you ask what happened to the tribals who were driven out of there. Absolutely nobody knows.

Coming to the cabinet, you see what happens. The minute suggestions are made as to what would perhaps benefit the people and what would benefit the classes, the tendency is to say that our great achievement is 9.2 per cent growth. Our great achievement is that Indian industrialists are buying Arcelor and Corus. That Time magazine thinks we are a great power.

In these circumstances, when a proposal came before the government to spend Rs 648 crore on the Gram Nyaya department, we were solemnly informed by one of the most influential ministers in the government to remember that we are a poor country. I was delighted when the next day he was with me in a group of ministers and I reminded him of his remark and said in that case can we stop spending the Rs 7000 crore on the Commonwealth Games and he said, “No, no, that is an international commitment and a matter of national pride.” This national pride will of course blow up if you spend Rs 7000 crore on the Commonwealth Games. We will be on the cover of Time and Newsweek.

I have always wondered why this rate of growth and economic reforms process is dated to Manmohan Singh. Because actually it should be dated to L.K. Jha’s book Economic Strategy for the 80s. It is the decade in which we quickly recovered from agricultural depression and registered a double digit growth. At the beginning of the decade our biggest import was crude oil and after that it was edible oil. By the end of the decade we were exporters of several kinds of edible oil.

Why is it that Nehru became successful with his Hindu rate of growth? The reason is that the Hindu rate of growth was five times what our pre-Hindu rate of growth was. From 1914 to 1947, the figures of which are available, the rate of growth of the Indian economy was 0.72 per cent. And we got the Hindu rate of growth which was five times that and it made a difference to the people. The minute you had solid land reforms, the people had their ‘zameen’. That is what Mother India was all about. People felt that they were involved in the process. All the political talk was: gareeb ke liye ham kya kar sakte hain. Indira Gandhi matched it beautifully when the entire political spectrum joined hands against her by saying, “Woh kehte hain Indira hatao, hum kehte hain Garibi hatao.”

There is nobody so marginal in a government as the minister of Panchayati Raj. I count for nothing. Nothing! When I was the minister of petroleum, I used to walk surrounded by this media. I kept on telling them that petrol prices can do only three things — go up, go down or remain where they are. And it was all over the place. But try and get them to write two words about the 700 million Indians — absolutely impossible. And now with terrestrial television it is even worse. You have to be quarreling with your mother-in-law or hitting your daughter-in-law to be able to hit the headlines. It is impossible to get particularly the pink papers to focus on issues that affect the bulk of the people. And it is so easy to get them to focus on issues that are of high relevance to only one or two per cent of the people.

I believe the CII, if it is serious about the issue, should not be restricting itself to 25 minutes discussion before lunch but hold discussions for ten days and maybe something will come out of it.
Edited extracts from a speech at the CII Northern Region annual meeting 2006-07, New Delhi, April 4

http://www.scidev.net/en/news/climate-change-linked-to-decline-in-asian-monsoon.html

Cave deposits can yield clues to climate change and monsoon strength

Flickr_Lyubov

Evidence that human-induced climate change may be affecting the Asian monsoon cycle has been published by a Chinese-US team.

Zhang Pingzhong, of Lanzhou University in China, analysed a 1,800-year-old stalagmite recovered from the Wanxiang Cave in West China’s Gansu Province, which lies on the current path of the Asian summer monsoon.

The team measured levels of the elements uranium and thorium throughout the stalagmite and analysed its oxygen isotope ratios — different forms of oxygen whose levels are linked to rainfall and thus provide a record of the climate at the time.

Records show that, before 1960, warmer years were associated with stronger monsoons, and the temperature decreased when the monsoon weakened. But the study found a reversed association after this date.

“The rising temperature now leads to less precipitation, which is not a natural pattern,” said Larry Edwards, geologist at the University of Minnesota and co-author of the paper, which was published in Science (November).

“So we came to an important conclusion that the monsoon had started to be affected by man-made causes.”

Using the literature, the researchers linked the changes to human-induced greenhouse gases and aerosols.

Their finding corresponds with previous work by Ding Yihui, a leading Chinese climatologist, on changes in China’s rainfall pattern in the late 1960s.

“The fact that recent Asian monsoon decline has taken place in the global warming period rather than in cold periods,” was an important finding, Ding told SciDev.Net.

But he said that more investigations were needed into its causes.

Ding said he is soon to publish another study in Science predicting Asian monsoon activity over the next 100 years.

The team also discovered that weak summer monsoons were highly correlated with the demise of major Chinese dynasties in the past four centuries.

Using the results from the stalagmite analyses, the team was able to match the amount of rainfall to the dates that China’s Tang, Yuan and Ming dynasties rose and fell.

For example, the researchers detected weak summer monsoon periods between 850 and 940 AD. This coincided with the last six decades of the Tang Dynasty. Decreased monsoon strength reduced the rainfall and led to a poorer harvest, which may have sparked unrest and led to the downfall of Tang.

WATER WISE

Apartments can do with RWH

S. VISHWANATH

Huge blocks of flats in cities can provide supplementary water requirement, manage floods and reduce pollution of the environment

Simple techniques: Storing rain and rooftop water in apartments has now become easy

Apartments are mushrooming all over our cities with the boom in the housing sector. These apartments place a huge demand on the infrastructure of the city, be it water, sewerage, stormwater drains or roads. By designing systems carefully and investing in sustainable technologies, apartments can provide supplementary water requirement, manage floods and reduce pollution of the environment.

Consider this large set of apartments in Koramangala which has eight blocks. Six of them have a roof area of 1,000 square metres and two of them have a roof area of 2,000 square metres. The flats are to a large extent dependent on borewells for their water requirement. Car washing in the basement is a significant water consumer. The apartment block wanted to implement a rainwater harvesting scheme to get enough water for the car washing purpose.

Rooftops are ideal catchments for rainwater. If they are clean and allow rainwater to runoff to the down pipes, it is more than enough. In these apartments, the rooftops were ideal catchments.

Down pipes bring the rainwater to the stormwater drains. They should ideally be separated from the sewage and grey water lines. The National Building Code recommends that rainwater pipes be separate from other waste water pipes to prevent overflowing manholes and also to prevent overload of the sewage treatment plants. Many apartments, due to faulty design, tend to merge the two. Here the case was exactly this. The rainwater pipes therefore had to be de-linked from the sewage pipes.

The down pipes were now connected to large rain barrels of 10,000 litre capacity in the basement. The harvested rainwater is to be used for car washing, gardening and other non-potable use. A total of 1.75 million litres of water annually is expected to be harvested from one block alone. Similarly, the collection process has been expanded to another block and in a phased manner will cover all blocks.

When the entire rooftop rainwater collection is put in place, the apartment will harvest 8.75 million litres annually from the rooftops alone.

Stormwater

The stormwater drainage network was found full of garbage and dirt. Regular cleaning will ensure that a substantial amount of storm water too becomes harvestable either to be stored or to be recharged into the aquifer.

Another set of apartments on Bannerghatta Road had not only kept the rooftop clean but also had ensured that the rainwater pipes were kept separate from sewage lines, connected and brought to one place. With a filter, the collection of rooftop rainwater into a 20,000 litre tank became very easy. When the rainwater quality was tested, it was actually found to be of potable standards. This apartment therefore decided to connect the rainwater tank to the regular sump and use the combined water for all purposes. With a 20,000 litre rainwater collection sump and a recharge well for the overflow, the apartment now collects or recharges 550,000 litres of rainwater annually.

Apartments can supplement their water requirement and increase the life of their borewells through smart designs and rainwater harvesting. They can also prevent urban floods. A system of clear guidelines and implementation skill will increase the sustainability of Bangalore’s waters. In this path is water wisdom.

www.rainwaterclub.orge-mail:zenrainman@gmail.com

Ph: 080-23641690

Now the challenge is to take it to all panchayats which can apply

We need you to tell us about them.

At Google.org, we believe quality public services – clean water, health, and education – are vital for human welfare and a strong economy. Providing meaningful, easily accessible information to citizens and communities, service providers, and policymakers is a key part of creating home-grown solutions to improve the quality of public services. Better information can help governments and other providers spend scarce resources wisely. And, empowered by information, citizens and communities can demand better services from providers or develop new solutions to meet their own needs.

The Google.org Gram Panchayat Puraskar recognizes that innovations in governance are happening every day in villages across India. We want to publicly recognize good ideas and create incentives for further innovation in local governance throughout the country. And we hope that this contest helps gram panchayats celebrate successes, share ideas with one another, and improve the quality of public services in villages.

Who is eligible

All legally recognized gram panchayats in the states of Karnataka or Andhra Pradesh, India are eligible to apply.

When to apply

The contest will be open for applications from December 12, 2008 through January 25, 2009. Entries must be postmarked on or before January 25, 2009 to be considered.

How to apply

To enter the contest, visit the contest website located at www.google.org/ggpp.html and pick-up an application at your district or block panchayat office in Karnataka or Andhra Pradesh during the Contest Period.

and we look forward with hope to address this issue globally and unitedly

Some of the best cinematic moments around rain is from the movie classic  Blade Runner.

Here’s Rutger Hauer and Harrison Ford in pouring rain from the final moments of this sci-fi by the incomparable

Ridley Scott

Tears in the rain

WATER WISE

Value for landscape

S. VISHWANATH

Edible landscaping can transform a non-functional water guzzling landscape into a functional, bountiful one

Need of the hour: Every city must have such spaces

Conventionally, landscapes have meant large grass lawns with a few plants thrown in to cater to an aesthetic sensibility which assumes that the front of the office or an industry or around apartments should look a certain way. Huge amounts of water are then thrown to keep this grass green and especially in summer time the amount of water use increases dramatically. It may take 10 litres of water per square metre or more to cope with bad sprinkler systems and evapo-transpir ation. A gardener is then appointed to take care of this landscape and usually he takes care of one acre of land.

Water-efficient landscapes

Choosing the right palate of plants, typically native species, usually results in a more water-efficient landscape. The use of water-spreading devices such as sprinklers, micro-sprinklers and drip irrigation systems is also one method of water conservation and water efficiency. The more environmentally aware people and institutions put in place waste water treatment systems to reuse water for landscape purpose. This reduces or eliminates the use of scarce fresh water resources for essentially a non-potable secondary use.

Xeriscaping is one other method where plants such as xerophytes attuned to arid climatic conditions are used to make do with low amounts of water. Plants such as bougainvillea have also been used in water-efficient landscapes to add water efficiency, low maintenance and colour to the landscapes.

Speciality of growing ragi

One form of landscaping which can add value in an era of water, food and fertilizer scarcity is edible landscaping. Imagine a landscape of an acre with Bermuda or Mexican grass. Suppose this was to be converted to a ‘ragi’ (finger millet) field, the same area could generate 8,000 to 10,000 kg. of ragi or millet every year. This is an edible landscape. If one has surplus treated wastewater and a zero discharge policy, then it would be possible to grow rice.

Advantages

Water is fast becoming a scarce resource. Food too is becoming costly. Many people are paying attention to the ‘virtual water’ embedded in food. If a kilogramme of rice has to be grown, it needs 3000 litres of water or more. Most institutions have canteens and need vegetables and grains. Apartments too have families and kitchens. The virtual water flow through these spaces is very high. An edible landscape would provide fresh food, vegetables and grains with the same water demand as for a normal landscape or perhaps less and with the same number of person hours.

Edible landscapes also bring inhabitants with the cycle of nature and the seasons. The month in which ragi or rice has to be planted, the months required for the plants to mature, the system of harvesting and threshing all these are on constant display and are an education to an urban populace not necessarily familiar with how their food is grown.

Gardeners employed from a rural background are usually familiar with edible landscapes and more so with the growing of grains and fruit trees and vegetables than with grass. Imagine your own freshly grown vegetables and fruits, organic to boot, taking care of your wastewater and compost on site and converting vacant spaces and gardens into fields and fruit bowls. Medicinal, aromatic and herbal plants can also be grown.

Edible landscaping can transform a non-functional water guzzling landscape into a functional, bountiful one. What is required is lateral thinking and a bit of water wisdom.

www.rainwaterclub.org

www.arghyam.org

e-mail:zenrainman@

gmail.com