Drinking water crisis to deepen in Panchthar as project stalled.
Residents of these villages were largely hopeful that the under-construction Tamor Lift Drinking Water Project would relieve them of water scarcity.
After discussion, the management team reconsidered Loripa as the best location for water source and consequently recommended constructing road till Loripa diversion.
Around 11 kilometer long road must be constructed to connect Loripa diversion with the road network.
And considering the budget required for constructing the road, some stakeholders are arguing to build the water source reservoir at Lamughat, Lawati said.
“Some are protesting against building the water reservoir at Lamughat, but they have to understand that it’s not possible to built infrastructure at Loripa as it lacks road.
We are in discussion with the stakeholders and look forward to resume the project by taking everyone concerned into confidence,” Chaudhari said.
Despite Chaudhari’s assertion, locals have their own concerns.
Dinanath Ghimire, a Lamughat resident asserted that, “Lamughat is more prone to landslides compared to Loripa.
“We are very much affected by water crisis and fetching water leaves little time to us for doing other things.

Western China leads fight against poverty.
Poverty, water scarcity and barren lands are what many associate with western China’s mountainous areas.
However in the county of Xiji, one of the poorest regions in China, people are finding ways to develop while being environmentally friendly.
Xu said that the company aimed to build a modern agricultural farm within five years and attract tourists to experience rural life.
In 2010, Jiao Jianpeng, 29, gave up his company in the city that was earning more than 1 million yuan a year and returned to his hometown to set up an ecological tourism company, covering farming, vegetable and fruit picking, accommodation and entertainment.
The village has now accepted more than 100,000 tourists with a total revenue of nearly 10 million yuan a year.
Many villagers saw the development of countryside tourism and chose to stay in the village.
Jiao Bingnan, a villager in Longwangba, turned his house into a homestay and earned more than 20,000 yuan.
Xiji and other eight county-level regions are on China’s list of 14 areas of abject poverty.
To achieve its target, China needs to bring more than 10 million people out of poverty every year.

Non-profit organisation Wishing Well International Foundation hosted a 10-day expedition to rural areas in Hazyview in Mpumalanga and Mathenjwa in KwaZulu-Natal to deploy over 100 water filters to homes and schools.
The aim of the project is to provide people with clean, safe drinking water.
The Bio-Foam filter is a relatively simply and affordable technology consisting of two buckets which use gravity to push water through a filtering system – purifying water obtained from boreholes, rain tanks, rivers and dams.
Local pastor Samuel Chauque led the team to more than 10 homes over a day and a half to deploy the first 30 filters.
On the fifth day of the trip we travel through Swaziland for sight-seeing and as a short cut to get to Mathenjwa in KwaZulu-Natal for the second area of deployment.
This second deployment is specifically aimed at schools.
Homes and schools are far apart and it seems government has just started building roads – for the most part it’s gravel road.
Principal of Mayaluka Primary School Thembeni Mathenjwa says some of the children at the school have no identity documents as many of them have one parent from Swaziland and another from South Africa.
For one, not only is clean water a scarcity, but water itself is rare.
Guzman also notes the often tiring and long process of going through government to run an expedition such as this one.

China Focus: Western China leads fight against poverty.
YINCHUAN, Sept. 13 (Xinhua) — Poverty, water scarcity and barren lands are what many associate with western China’s mountainous areas.
However in the county of Xiji, one of the poorest regions in China, people are finding ways to develop while being environmentally friendly.
Xu said that the company aimed to build a modern agricultural farm within five years and attract tourists to experience rural life.
In 2010, Jiao Jianpeng, 29, gave up his company in the city that was earning more than 1 million yuan a year and returned to his hometown to set up an ecological tourism company, covering farming, vegetable and fruit picking, accommodation and entertainment.
The village has now accepted more than 100,000 tourists with a total revenue of nearly 10 million yuan a year.
Many villagers saw the development of countryside tourism and chose to stay in the village.
Jiao Bingnan, a villager in Longwangba, turned his house into a homestay and earned more than 20,000 yuan.
Xiji and other eight county-level regions are on China’s list of 14 areas of abject poverty.
To achieve its target, China needs to bring more than 10 million people out of poverty every year.

Staff Reporter, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has issued instructions to officials to launch a drive for holding flowing rain water from September 15.
He has instructed to make action plan for farmers’ income not getting reduced due to rain deficit, observe Swachhata fortnight and get prepared for rabi crop considering rain shortfall.
Chouhan asked the district in-charge ministers to assess availability of water for irrigation with public representatives and administrative officers between September 15 and 20.
Chouhan was reviewing contingency action plan to deal with situation arising from deficient rainfall after the Cabinet meeting.
Presentations were made by Agriculture, Water Resources, Public Health Engineering, Animal Husbandry, Co-operatives and Urban Administration Departments regarding preparation for tackling short rainfall.
Chouhan directed the Agriculture Department’s officials that it should be ensured that contingency plan prepared for rain shortfall is informed to farmers effectively.
Information regarding availability of water for irrigation, minor, semi-irrigated crops and availability of their seeds, should be communicated to farmers.
The Chief Minister asked officers of Water Resources Department that they should inform farmers in advance about availability of water in reservoirs.
Chief Minister asked Public Health Engineering Department that draft of the action plan for period up to July 2018 should be put in the next Cabinet meeting in co-ordination with Panchayat and Rural Development Department.
Chief Minister asked Animal Husbandry Department to launch awareness drive for storing fodder of paddy, maze and soyabean crops.Chouhan reviewed preparations for Swachhata Fortnight to be observed between September 15 and October 2.

Major cities in Africa, including Johannesburg, will accommodate a total of about 200 million people within 20 years, according to the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements.
Andre Dzikus, a spokesperson for the organisation, said Africa had become the continent with the fastest-growing population, and he estimates that the continent’s population will rise to 500 million by 2020.
He said this increasing concentration of people was already putting pressure on water resources.
He added there were countries in Africa that were already rationing water supplies to residents.
"In some cities, there are already intermittent water supplies.
People get water only during the day or at night – some receive water only twice a week," he said.
The Programme to Manage Water for African Cities is aimed at effectively addressing the growing urban water crisis and protecting the resource and its aquatic systems against pollution from cities.
Water Affairs and Forestry Minister Ronnie Kasrils said almost half of Africa’s people did not receive adequate water or sanitation services.
Governments had to guard against becoming only regulators of water supplies and should move towards allowing private/public partnerships to take on the task of water provision – but at a profit, Kasrils warned.
Delegates from the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Ethiopia, Senegal, Zambia, South Africa and Kenya are on study visits to Windhoek, Johannesburg and Durban to gain first-hand knowledge of local water management practices.

Northwestern U. and Ben-Gurion U. sign water research agreement.
Northwestern University and Ben-Gurion University Sign Water Research MOU in the Presence of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel CHICAGO…September 12, 2017 – Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) and Northwestern University (NU) signed a research memorandum of understanding (MOU) in Tel Aviv yesterday to collaborate on water research.
The agreement is a follow up to successful collaborations between the University of Chicago (UC) and BGU.
Today, at Israel’s largest international water conference and exhibition, WATEC 2017, Mayor Emanuel said, "Four years ago, Ben-Gurion University and the University of Chicago started a joint project.
An interdisciplinary team from BGU’s world-renowned Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research and the Northwestern Center for Water Research will include hydrologists, soil scientists, geologists, chemists, microbiologists, and engineers.
This is an important step toward the vision of broader collaboration on water with Israel that was developed jointly by the Water Center and the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies at Northwestern."
Two projects between NU and BGU are already underway: Novel Tools for the Cross-cultural Assessment of Water Insecurity and Water Interventions: Sera Young, Northwestern; Noam Weisbrod, BGU; and Hwong-wen Ma, National Taiwan University Next Generation Water Treatment Technology for Brine Management and Decentralized Water Supply: Kyoo Chul Park, Northwestern; Neelesh Patankar, Northwestern; and Jack Gilron, BGU A number of successful joint research projects have emerged from the UC-BGU ongoing collaboration that began four years ago.
### About BGU’s Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research The Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research, Israel’s largest and leading water institute, conducts interdisciplinary, cutting-edge research and graduate education in water sciences, aimed at improving human well-being through technologies and policies for sustainable use of water resources.
As Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) looks ahead to turning 50 in 2020, AABGU imagines a future that goes beyond the walls of academia.
by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.

EVANSTON – Northwestern University engineers and social scientists, playing a leading role in seeking solutions to a global crisis over water insecurity, visited Israel this week to deepen academic exchanges, create new partnerships and collaborate with Chicago officials who are also working on the problem.
Members of the Northwestern community are in Israel participating in WATEC, a major international water industry conference, as part of a delegation with the city of Chicago.
Yesterday, Aaron Packman, director of the Northwestern Center for Water Research, and Fruma Yehiely, associate vice president for research at Northwestern, signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Ben-Gurion University’s Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research in Israel.
A key focus of the trip is to highlight Chicago’s leading role in advancing water technology innovation and conservation through Current while showcasing new collaborations leveraging Israeli water expertise.
Israel has large-scale water reuse for agriculture, according to Packman.
Water research is already underway by Northwestern researchers and their counterparts at Ben-Gurion University.
“What we hope to achieve is to answer the following question: Is it possible to design optimal mesh or nets that allow rain water to pass through in one direction but prevents water vapor transport through in the other direction?” Patankar said.
“In arid regions like Israel, water evaporation directly from soil is about 40 percent of the water budget in agriculture,” Patankar said.
To solve this dilemma, we propose these novel moisture-valving nets.” A more holistic approach Sera L. Young, assistant professor of anthropology and global health at Northwestern, is working with researchers from Ben-Gurion and National Taiwan University on developing a scale that measures the full human experience with water.
Moreover, we can use this scale to see if the technology is working.

Today, the nation’s water supply is more constrained than ever: wells are running dry, groundwater is increasingly polluted and precious water leaks from old pipes.
Samer Talozi, a water expert at the Jordan University of Science and Technology in Irbid, says that the country has become an international test bed because of the environmental, structural and social challenges to its water supply.
“If we can build systems that work in Jordan,” he says, “they will work everywhere.” But not all technologies evolving in Jordan are new.
In August, Hassan Fahad al-Rhaibeh, the mayor of the Jordanian town of Umm el-Jimal, was re-elected after pledging to restore reservoirs built by Arabs as early as ad 90.
Winter rains and run-off from mountains in Syria — 10 kilometres to the north — once streamed through canals and into basalt-block reservoirs, which stored the water throughout parched summers.
“It’s becoming apparent that if people don’t return to some reliance on surface water, they will run out and farms will dry up,” de Vries says.
The US Agency for International Development has invested more than US$700 million since 2000 to develop water technology in Jordan, as a way of preventing that outcome.
And the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany, is collaborating with the Jordanian government to test small, soil-filtered waste-treatment facilities that could lessen the leakage and inefficiencies seen in large plants, which can pollute nearby groundwater.
“The flow of Syrian refugees to Germany more or less started when camps in Jordan could not support them.” Talozi says the country might take its cue from ancient systems in Petra and Umm el-Jimal and store more rain — although these conduits alone cannot support today’s population.
“As civilizations rotated through this land, one constant over time is the reuse and reliance of the water system,” he says.

Investors: Food firms must embrace smarter water practices.
That is the conclusion of a major new report from the investor-backed Ceres think tank, which today ranks the world’s largest food and drink companies based on their response to water risks, such as water security, droughts, and flood risks.
The report, entitled Feeding Ourselves Thirsty: Tracking Food Company Progress Toward a Water-Smart Future, provides 42 of the world’s largest food and drink firms with a score out of 100 based on the quality of their water risk disclosures and risk management efforts.
It found that overall the food sector’s performance has improved by 10 per cent since the first edition of the report was published in 2015.
However, the average score for the 42 companies benchmarked was still only 31 points and despite improvements, the meat and agricultural products industries continue to lag far behind the packaged food and beverage industries.
The top scoring companies included Nestle with a score of 82, Coca-Cola with a score of 72 and Unilever with a score of 70.
However, there were signs some parts of the food supply chain are lagging far behind in the quality of their water risk management.
Brooke Barton, senior director of water and food at Ceres, who co-authored the report, said it was critical for the industry as a whole to step up its response to water-related risks, especially as climate impacts escalate.
"This updated analysis can be used by large institutional investors to reassess their environmental risk engagements, especially with the low-scoring companies held in their portfolios," she said.
"It also provides investors a clearer perspective on how well – or not – food companies are responding to water risk in order to sustain a competitive advantage in their market sector."