Thursday, July 27, 2017

Vatican turns off 100 fountains as Rome goes dry

I remember to have visited Rome twice in the last two decades. One special feature of this historical city was that water used to flow freely all the time in the year with no tap to close its flow. It was a wonder for me as a person coming from a country where no safe drinking water was available to majority of its citizens despite the self rule by Indians since independence in 1947.

The same city of Rome is facing acute shortage of drinking water forcing its famous fountains to remain dry - an astonishing and shocking development in the Western world like in the case water-deficit countries like India.

Nature seems to have been highly disturbed by human actions in the last one century and more so in the past five decades or so, that regular monsoon and rainfall have become so erratic and unreliable - likely to lead to miserable conditions for human life on this planet. May be a few millions and millions of human beings will start dying for want of water regularly in the days to come unless some miraculous measures are found and corrective measures are put in place.
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Alarming bell on state's granary

Thanks to the research undertaken by a retired professor of the Madras Institute of Development Studies S. Janakrajan covering a period of four decades since 1971 on the Cauvery delta region, regarded as the granary of Tamil Nadu with the assistance of Indian Council of Social Science Research, the following findings are shockingly revealed as expected by some of us for quite sometime :

1)The delta region has shrunk by 20% due to anthropogenic factors such as diversion of land for non-agricultural purposes as well as factors linked to climate change.

2)The drastic reduction in crop cover and a 13-fold increase in wastelands between  1971 and 2014 indicate a worrisome phenomenon.

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