Anyone familiar with the farmer suicide crisis in India will know the place Warangal. Located in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India, Warangal is considered the epicenter of the farmer suicide crisis. It is here that the farmer suicides by the hundreds were first recorded in 1998.

Finally some good news to report: Marks & Spencer, UK based retailer will continue to invest in the ‘Better Cotton’ Initiative for the next three and a half years. Their press release says the investment will extend to 20,000 farmers in Warangal.

M&S will now continue to fund the project for the next three and a half years to extend the project to 20,000 farmers. It is a joint venture between M&S and WWF. Results from last year include:

• 51 per cent less water use;
• 81 per cent less pesticide ‘active ingredient’ use;
• 53 per cent less synthetic fertiliser use.

Why should we care?

India is currently the 2nd largest producer of cotton in the world (China is #1). And, cotton is a water hog – It can take more than 20,000 litres of water to produce 1kg of cotton; equivalent to a single T-shirt and pair of jeans.

The theme of 2011′s World Water Day is Water for cities: responding to the urban challenge. By virtue of sheer numbers, India more than any other country in the world needs to wake up to the formidable challenge it faces in the years ahead.

According to the UN: This is the first time in human history that most of the world’s population live in cities: 3.3 billion people …and the urban landscape continues to grow. 38% of the growth is represented by expanding slums, while the city populations are increasing faster than city infrastructure can adapt.

Here’s another statistic that is simply staggering: Urban expansion in India will happen at a speed quite unlike anything the country or the world has seen before. It took nearly 40 years (from 1971 to 2008) for India’s urban population to rise by nearly 230 million; it will take only half that time to add the next 250 million. (Read full report at McKinsey Quarterly)

India’s cities burst at the seams decades ago. Water and sanitation are no longer just ‘poor people’s problems.’ Hari Bhatti’s photo essay on Delhi’s nallahs is a wakeup call to anyone who thinks it is.

Via Hari Batti's Green Light Dhaba: A Delhi drain choked with garbage that ultimately ends up in the Yamuna river.

Blame the Brits for the mess they left on India’s borders. But 64 years after India became independent we have wonder what our own government has been doing all this time. If we’re going to seek a permanent UN Security Council seat then it is high time India moved to get off the fence – literally and figuratively.

The Economist has an interesting article ‘The land that maps forgot’:

EVER since Bangladesh achieved its independence in 1971, struggles over territory and terrorism, rather than the exchange of goods and goodwill, have dominated its relations with its mega-neighbour. Forty years on, both countries appear to be nearing an agreement to solve the insoluble—by swapping territory.

The planned exchange of parcels of each other’s territory is concentrated around some 200 enclaves. These are like islands of Indian and Bangladeshi territory surrounded completely by the other country’s land, clustered on either side of Bangladesh’s border with the district of Cooch Behar, in the Indian state of West Bengal. Surreally, these include about two dozen counter-enclaves (enclaves within enclaves), as well as the world’s only counter-counter enclave—a patch of Bangladesh that is surrounded by Indian territory…itself surrounded by Bangladeshi territory.

Via Economist: The Land That Maps Forgot

This is P. Sainath once again asking not just Indians, but human beings to reflect for a minute on farmer suicides in India.

256,949

(Read full post at The Hindu) It means over a quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1995. It means the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history has occurred in this country in the past 16 years. It means one-and-a-half million human beings, family members of those killing themselves, have been tormented by the tragedy. While millions more face the very problems that drove so many to suicide. It means farmers in thousands of villages have seen their neighbours take this incredibly sad way out. A way out that more and more will consider as despair grows and policies don’t change. It means the heartlessness of the Indian elite is impossible to imagine, leave alone measure.

Note that these numbers are gross underestimates to begin with. Several large groups of farmers are mostly excluded from local counts. Women, for instance. Social and other prejudice means that, most times, a woman farmer killing herself is counted as suicide — not as a farmer’s suicide. Because the land is rarely in a woman’s name.

A sculpture made from plastic bottles discarded at a yoga retreat becomes an artist’s environmental plea to save the severely polluted Yamuna River (Read the genesis of ‘Indra’s Cloud’ and the  full slideshow at Anne’s site)

Unfortunately the plea is practically insignificant in the bigger picture that is bottled water:

Bottled water produces up to 1.5 million tons of plastic waste per year. According to Food and Water Watch, that plastic requires up to 47 million gallons of oil per year to produce. And while the plastic used to bottle beverages is of high quality and in demand by recyclers, over 80 percent of plastic bottles are simply thrown away. (More at MNN)

Indra's Cloud, Vrindavan