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Ms.
Sunita Nadhamuni discusses Arghyam’s
projects along with their impact
We
take up several activities at Arghyam. First,
as a funding organisation we have given
grants primarily to NGOs in rural water
sector. We have 36 projects that we’ve
supported across the country in 12 states
like Rajasthan, Gujarat, all of south India;
Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and the North East.
Through these grants, we support a range
of programmes ranging from Rainwater Harvesting
to domestic water management, sanitation,
water quality and waste water treatment.
All of these grants are to small and large
NGOs and research organisations. That is
one part of what we do.
Second we are working on urban water management.
We have taken up one town close to Bangalore
called Mulbagal. There we are working with
many of the stakeholders - from the local
government to the community and research
organisations, to collectively come up with
a model for integrated urban water management.
Third, we are running the India Water Portal,
a website dedicated to providing information,
services and tools for the water sector.
This has been running for two years now.
Recently we have launched a Kannada portal
and a Hindi portal. The latest one is a
Sanitation portal.
Finally
we are running a water sanitation survey
across the state of Karnataka where we are
working with a group of NGOs and volunteers.
We’ve gone to 800 villages on the
ground to get an accurate picture of water
sanitation situation and challenges and
the issues that people are facing.
We are supporting and working on a range
of initiatives across the country, and we
hope that the impact of our work will be
large. Here are a couple of examples.
In some cases we are working with the government
e.g. in Gujarat there is a Government programme
in 130 villages to set up domestic water
systems using local water resources. These
villages are at the tail end of Narmada
Project so they do not get access to water.
In this government program we have helped
NGOs to participate and mobilise the community.
Now we have large number of people who have
access to basic water needs.
In Karnataka, again with the government,
we are supporting a program called Sachethana
in 60 villages which are fluoride affected.
Here, the objective is to provide rainwater
harvesting systems in these villages as
the ground water is heavily contaminated
with fluoride and people need an alternate
source of drinking water. In these villages
we have seen tremendous changes, some of
the people are actually worship their rainwater
because of the huge impact it has had on
their lives!
