(no subject) For frugality and sensible use -Sunita Narain

August 17, 2004

Labangalatika Prabhu -- a most interesting editorial.

I actually had a little trouble accessing it, so I pasted a couple

paragraphs and the link below, in case others have trouble reading .eml

format.

Thanks for sharing with us all.

ys

hkdd

Rosalie Malik wrote:

>Haribol. I hope this reaches the conference ys Labangaltika dasi

>

>-----------------------

>To from this mailing list, send an email to:

>Cow-Owner (AT) pamho (DOT) net

>

....Secondly, we must learn to practice conserving water. It is clear the use

of water has two major management systems. One, as consumptive use -- the

used water is consumed and 'virtually' transferred via a product -- say a

crop in agriculture -- to us in our food. And two as process use, where

water is mostly discharged after use and rejoins the water cycle, as when

cities discharge 80 per cent of the water consumed as sewage.

Therefore, policies will have to be built to optimise our use in both

these broad sectors. A Vaidyanathan, one of India's most eminent

irrigation economists, has recently published along with his colleague K

Sivasubramaniyan what I think is perhaps the first estimation that fathoms

the value of the foodcrop, through the value of the raindrop -- the yield

per hectare per unit of water consumed (see link to article, below). Their

study reveals interesting issues for policy.

It points out that of the 660

billion cubic metres of total consumptive use of water by crops, roughly

55 per cent is accounted for by irrigated crops. Rice alone accounts for a

little over 20 per cent of all water consumed by all crops, but wheat

alone uses 30 per cent of the irrigated water. Interestingly, while yields

per unit of irrigated area are higher than in unirrigated areas, the yield

per unit of consumptive use of water is not always higher - in fact, it is

normally 10 to 30 per cent lower....

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