1. Local Responses to Water Resource Degradation.
- Author
-
Buechler, Stephanie and Mekala, Gayathri Devi
- Subjects
WATER pollution ,WATER supply ,WATER quality ,INDUSTRIAL wastes ,POPULATION ,WASTEWATER treatment - Abstract
Local response to water pollution is an understudied area of inquiry. Yet water in India and globally is becoming degraded at an increasingly rapid rate demanding complex, dynamic strategies tailored to ever-evolving local contexts. Innovation is considered here as a process. The type of water resource degradation described here results from inflows of a combination of largely untreated urban domestic sewage water, industrial effluent and hospital and commercial waste into the Musi river that runs through Hyderabad city, south India. A burgeoning urban population has translated into greater volumes of water supplied to the city; greater volumes of wastewater are therefore produced. The wastewater flows into the river and is channeled for irrigation downstream in the drought-prone, semi-arid urban, peri-urban and rural areas. The authors studied groundwater use in wastewater-irrigated areas and found that paddy (rice) and fodder grass farmers engaged in continuous innovation as a response to deteriorating irrigation water quality yet increased water availability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2005