This book deals with environmental effects on both sides of the border between Bangladesh and India caused by the Ganges water diversion. This issue came to my attention in early 1976 when news media in Bangladesh and overseas, began publications of articles on the unilateral withdrawal of a huge quantity of water from the Ganges River through the commissioning of the Farakka Barrage in India. I first pursued the subject professionally in 1984 while working as a contributor for Bangladesh Today, Holiday and New Nation. During the next two decades, I followed the protracted hydro-political negotiations between the riparian countries in the Ganges basin, and I traveled extensively to observe the environmental and ecological changes in Bangladesh as well as India that occurred due to the water diversion. The Ganges, one of the longest rivers of the world originates at the Gangotri glacier in the Himalayas and flows across the plains of North India. Eventually the river splits into two main branches and empties into the Bay of Bengal. The conflict of diversion and sharing of the Ganges water arose in the middle of the last century when the government of India decided to implement a barrage at Farakka to resolve a navigation problem at the Kolkata Port.

Filled with figures, images, and illustrations, Encyclopedia of Water Science, Second Edition provides effective concepts and procedures in environmental water science and engineering. It unveils a wide spectrum of design concepts, methods, and solutions for enhanced performance of water quality, treatment, conservation, and irrigation methods, as well as improved water efficiency in industrial, municipal, and agricultural programs. The second edition also includes greatly enhanced coverage of streams and lakes as well as many regional case studies. An International Team Addresses Important Issues The only source to provide full coverage of current debates in the field, the encyclopedia offers professional expertise on vital issues including: Current laws and regulations Irrigation management Environmental water economics Agroforestry Erosion control Nutrient best management practices Water sanitation Stream and lake morphology and processes Sharpen Your Skills — Meet Challenges Well-Armed A direct and reliable source for best practices in water handling, preservation, and recovery, the encyclopedia examines challenges in the provision of safe water supplies, guiding environmental professionals as they face a worldwide demand for sanitary and affordable water reserves. Also Available Online This Taylor & Francis encyclopedia is also available through online subscription, offering a variety of extra benefits for researchers, students, and librarians, including: Citation tracking and alerts Active reference linking Saved searches and marked lists HTML and PDF format options Contact Taylor and Francis for more information or to inquire about subscription options and print/online combination packages. US: (Tel) 1.888.318.2367; (E-mail) [email protected] International: (Tel) +44 (0) 20 7017 6062; (E-mail) [email protected]

“There's Money in Thirst,” reads a headline in the New York Times. The CEO of Nestlé, purveyor of bottled water, heartily agrees. It is important to give water a market value, he says in a promotional video, so “we're all aware that it has a price.” But for those who have no access to clean water, a fifth of the world's population, the price is thirst. This is the frightening landscape that Karen Piper conducts us through in The Price of Thirst—one where thirst is political, drought is a business opportunity, and more and more of our most necessary natural resource is controlled by multinational corporations. In visits to the hot spots of water scarcity and the hotshots in water finance, Piper shows us what happens when global businesses with mafia-like powers buy up the water supply and turn off the taps of people who cannot pay: border disputes between Iraq and Turkey, a “revolution of the thirsty” in Egypt, street fights in Greece, an apartheid of water rights in South Africa. The Price of Thirst takes us to Chile, the first nation to privatize 100 percent of its water supplies, creating a crushing monopoly instead of a thriving free market in water; to New Delhi, where the sacred waters of the Ganges are being diverted to a private water treatment plant, fomenting unrest; and to Iraq, where the U.S.-mandated privatization of water resources destroyed by our military is further destabilizing the volatile region. And in our own backyard, where these same corporations are quietly buying up water supplies, Piper reveals how “water banking” is drying up California farms in favor of urban sprawl and private towns. The product of seven years of investigation across six continents and a dozen countries, and scores of interviews with CEOs, activists, environmentalists, and climate change specialists, The Price of Thirst paints a harrowing picture of a world out of balance, with the distance between the haves and have-nots of water inexorably widening and the coming crisis moving ever closer.

From time immemorial the Bengal Delta had been an important maritime des- nation for traders from all parts of the world. The actual location of the port of call varied from time to time in line with the natural hydrographic changes. From the early decades of the second millennium AD, traders from the European con- nent also joined the traders from the Arab countries, who had been the Forerunners in maritime trading with India. Daring traders and fortune seekers from Denmark, Holland, Belgium and England arrived at different ports of call along the Hooghly river. The river had been, in the meantime, losing its pre-eminence as the main outlet channel of the sacred Ganga into the Bay of Bengal, owing to a shift of ?ow towards east near Rajmahal into the Padma, which had been so long, carried very small part of the large volume of ?ow. On a cloudy afternoon on August 24, 1690 the British seafarer Job Charnock rested his oars at Kolkata and started a new chapter in the life of a sleepy village, bordering the Sunderbans which was ‘a tangled region of estuaries, rivers and water courses, enclosing a vast number of islands of various shapes and sizes. ’ and infested with a large variety of wild animals. In the language of the British Nobel Laureate (1907) Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). ???? ???? Thus the midday halt of Charnock grew a city.

Présentation de l'éditeur : "Despite Asia's large share of global water resources, and the importance of its water for sustaining one of the largest agrarian populations in the world, Asia's trans boundary water resource management regimes are poorly developed. There are only two working international regimes in South and South-east Asia: the Mekong and the Indus regimes. The remaining international watercourses in Asia are used by riparian countries in a self-interested manner, without much consideration for the interests of other states or for the environment. These national interests do not often represent the interests and needs of the local people. This book is divided into three Parts. Part I discusses the different contexts of law-making in the industrialized west and in agrarian societies in Asia, as well as the changing context of law-making following the emergence of the concept of sustainable development. Part II discusses the regime of international watercourses. Part III of the book presents two case studies in Asia: the Mekong and the Ganges. The main argument is that in the absence of public participation in decision-making and resource management, the basin states revert to using the watercourses according to the principles of the classical regime. The result, so far, has been unsustainable development, environmental degradation and growing poverty of local user communities."

Contributed articles.

The discourse on the human right to water presents deliberations on the concept, content and rationale for the right, with little attention to the practical question of translating the right into reality. This book aims to fill this void by focusing on ‘realization’ of the right by its holders, examining how effective the mechanisms are for ‘implementing’ the right in enabling its universal realization. In a quest to answer this question, the book draws a conceptual differentiation between ‘implementation’ and ‘realization’ of the right, arguing that unlike implementation - which is an objective process of creation and implementation of measures such as legal frameworks, institutional structures or policy and action guidelines, realization of the right is a subjective process that extends much beyond. It takes shape within specific contextual settings which may include varied situations, yet remains neglected in the related academic and action forums. This book attempts to address this void by discussing some of the most significant contexts and the underlying problems and concerns that strongly influence realization of the human right to water. It contends that if the right is to be truly realized, these different contexts - which can be further classified as 'objective' and 'subjective' - must be understood, analysed and appropriately addressed before framing and implementing relevant action. The book further situates the human right to water discourse in a broader interdisciplinary perspective, expanding its scope beyond the narrower legal dimensions, linking it to the wider field of water resources management/governance. Through the novel ideas it proposes, the book makes an innovative and unique contribution in the field of human right to water which is of great scientific value.