It settles out?

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In Rajasthan, two boys in the 8th standard fill their father’s cart with water from the village naadi, or pond. It takes around an hour and a half for them to complete this task daily, and provides just enough water for the eight family members, 10 to 15 goat, a cow, and a bullock. The quality of their water becomes less important when quantity is a concern.

I’ve been working frantically for just over a week on putting together a piece for this year’s edition of Flux Magazine, only to learnĀ at the last minute that my story was cut because I’m not an active student. If I have time next week, I’ll finish up what I was writing and publish it.

Silent killer

Silent Killer

A woman from Nanegaon in the Kolwan Valley west of Pune carries water home past the heavily-fertilized sugarcane fields near her community’s open well. Sugarcane requires copious amounts of water and heavy fertilization, most commonly with a nitrate-based urea. Although not fully understood, excess amounts of nitrates have been associated with methaemoglobinaemia, a potentially life-threatening condition of depleted blood-oxygen levels, especially serious in bottle-fed infants.

According to Mr. Shyam Divan, a Senior Advocate for the Supreme Court of India, there are no legal frameworks in India with which to prosecute those releasing industrial contaminants (agro or otherwise) to a public water supply.

Waste to the river

Waste to the river

Just below the Dapka Ghat in Kanpur, a “nhala” or drainage ditch, pours raw sewage into the Ganges River. The pollution is 80% domestic and 20% industrial. Waste treatment should have been addressed by the Ganga Action Plan of 1985 but, like many of India’s environmental programs, it didn’t bear fruit because of the size of the issue and complexity of the political action required to solve it. In the meantime, the number of leather factories has jumped from 175 to over 400, substantially increasing the amount of waste disposed in the river.