India Water Portal, Bangalore : Newsletter for March 2007

Welcome to the India Water Portal newsletter.

Here are some of the things that have been going on at the Water Portal:

* The Water Portal was officially launched at a function at the Prime Minister’s residence, on January 12th 2007 on the occasion of the submission of the 2006 report of the National Knowledge Commission. More information and photos at: http://www.indiawaterportal.org/arghyam/happenings.php

* Based on feedback from several people we have made some changes to the colors and fonts to make the text more readable and accessible. We hope these changes help to make the Portal more accessible.

* We have added several pieces of new content to the Tools and Techniques section: http://indiawaterportal.org/Tools%20&%20Techniques/

A few of these are:

-NREGA Watershed Works Manual by Samaj Pragati Sahyog, in English and Hindi, under (”Watershed Development - Courses”)
-Training Modules in Telugu for watershed works participants in projects in Andhra Pradesh, created by WASSAN (under “Watershed Development - Courses”)
-A short humorous movie in Kannada introducing the idea of Rainwater Harvesting (under “Rainwater Harvesting - Movies”)

* The Meteorological Data tool is at: http://ngos.indiawaterportal.org/mapguide/MetData/ajaxtiledviewersample.jsp.

This has been enhanced to include Evapotranspiration data. You can now get Reference Crop Evapotranspiration and Potential Evapotranspiration information from 1901 to 2002. The calculation method for these parameters is explained here: http://indiawaterportal.org/Data%20&%20Resources/Meteorological%20Data/ETmanual_onlineversion.doc

* We have started two new discussions on “Fighting Drought in 2007” and “Urban Water Management”. The earlier discussion thread on “The 1999 Karnataka Groundwater Act” has been closed with a summary of the comments added. The summary can be viewed at : http://www.indiawaterportal.org/Network/Discussion%20Forum/viewtopic.php?p=190#190

* On the “Organisation Locator” Application: http://indiawaterportal.org/Organisations/ the “Add Your Organisation” form has been updated to ask for more information. This is to increase the credibility of the data on the tool. Currently the database has more 700 organisations. We request you to add your organization into the database if its not already present. If it is present already, please check the correctness of the data and let us know about any changes needed.

* The Search functionality on the Portal has been improved

Future plans for the project include a section with Resources for children and teachers and a section that will summarize project information for large government projects across the country in the area of water. We are in the process of putting the portal on a CD for offline access. We are also continually updating the Tools and Techniques section with more resources. We welcome your input on any of the above.

We would love to hear from you about your impressions of the Water Portal, and what part of the content you found useful, and if there is other content that you would like to see on the portal. Please mail us at portal@arghyam.org

With best wishes,

India Water Portal team.