Beyond water, beyond boundaries: spaces of water management in the Krishna river basin, South India

As demand and competition for water resources increase, the river basin has become the primary unit for water management and planning. While appealing in principle, practical implementation of river basin management and allocation has often been problematic. This paper examines the case of the Krishna basin in South India. It highlights that conflicts over basin water are embedded in a broad reality of planning and development where multiple scales of decisionmaking and non-water issues are at play. While this defines the river basin as a disputed "space of dependence", the river basin has yet to acquire a social reality. It is not yet a "space of engagement" in and for which multiple actors take actions. This explains the endurance of an interstate dispute over the sharing of the Krishna waters and sets limits to what can be achieved through further basin water allocation and adjudication mechanisms – tribunals – that are too narrowly defined. There is a need to extend the domain of negotiation from that of a single river basin to multiple scales and to non-water sectors. Institutional arrangements for basin management need to internalise the political spaces of the Indian polity: the states and the panchayats. This re-scaling process is more likely to shape the river basin as a space of engagement in which partial agreements can be iteratively renegotiated, and constitute a promising alternative to the current interstate stalemate.     

Resource Struggles and the Politics of Place in North Lampung, Indonesia

This paper considers the difficulties inherent in countering the negative effects of globalisation in Indonesia through an enhanced recognition of place-based cultural communities, which are seen to offer an alternative and more progressive path towards development. Focusing on the local history of resource struggles involving Javanese migrants and local people in North Lampung, the paper examines the ways that different groups of migrants and local Lampung people have dealt with changing resource control mechanisms in the context of the local transmigration ( Translok ) programme and large-scale agro-industrial development in the region. Whilst elites have been able to develop their personal wealth by capitalising on political and economic uncertainty, poor people from both groups have had to contend with conflict and increasing livelihood vulnerability that, if anything, has been intensified through the reassertion of place-based cultures of resource control. In challenging populist narratives of resistance to transmigration that pit migrants against "indigenous" local people, the paper identifies the class-related ambivalences towards development and structures of authority that cut across community and locality in the Translok zone     

Hurricane 07B in the Godavari Delta, Andhra Pradesh, India: vulnerability, mitigation and the spatial impact

Few hurricane impact studies provide robust spatial parameters of damage or relate geographical patterns of destruction accurately to storm trajectories or agencies. A detailed spatial analysis is, therefore, presented of the destruction caused by tropical hurricane 07B which made landfall on 6/7 November 1996 over the Godavari Delta region, Andhra Pradesh, eastern India. Patterns of destruction by storm surge, wind and flood water are quantitatively mapped for death tolls, house destruction and agricultural damage using local administrative ( mandal ) data bases. Results show that most impact occurred near the coast, but a well-defined path of destruction across the central part of the delta can be identified. Such mapping studies fail to indicate the types of individuals and social groups most affected by the storm hazard and their response to it. An investigation of landowning farmers, female migrant rural labourers and fishing communities in the delta shows that poverty and social ordering in Indian society puts differential limits on the risk reduction abilities of individuals and social groups in the face of the cyclone hazard. The paper also demonstrates that 'top down' institutional measures to reduce the effects of storm damage such as those introduced in the aftermath of hurricane 07B, including early storm warning and evacuation procedures and rehabilitation programmes, remain largely ineffective. It is suggested that the introduction of more 'bottom up' community-based programmes which seek to improve the risk awareness and risk avoiding abilities of affected individuals and groups would be much more beneficial. The case material on hurricane 07B and its effects are placed in context by reviewing and updating long and medium-term time series records of storm frequencies and impacts in the Bay of Bengal and particularly along the eastern coastline of India.     

Race,Space, and Struggles for Mobility: Transportation Impacts on African Americans in Oakland and the East Bay

Abstract

A long history of overt discrimination left an enduring racialized imprint upon the geography of the East Bay. While the benefits of a metropolitan decentralization of jobs, housing, and public investment fell to Whites, discrimination in employment and housing trapped African Americans in urban neighborhoods burdened by infrastructure encroachment and divestment. By circa 1970, overt discrimination succumbed to new, racially neutral, legal, and administrative forms, including regional planning processes. Using an environmental racism framework, we show that these new forms reproduced the existing racialized geography by means of new inequalities in representation and transportation service provision. These new regional transportation policies, like those challenged by a 2005 civil rights lawsuit, favored the mobility needs of more affluent suburbanites over those of African American East Bay bus riders. These policies, layered onto an existing racialized geography, reinforced existing inequalities by failing to address racial barriers to opportunity in the built environment. [Key words: transportation, race, segregation, Oakland]     

Vegetational development from about 12,000 to 6,000 years B.P. in the counties of Agder and Telemark,South Norway

Sediment cores from several localities in Agder and Telemark are pollen analytically investigated. The immigration of some plant species during the time interval from about 12,000 to 6,000 years B.P. is discussed. The oldest samples contained pollen typical of a pioneer vegetation. The plant immigration is partly ¹⁴C-dated, partly dated only by interpolation or estimation based on the ¹⁴C-dates. From these data, immigration and migration routes are suggested. Betula nana, Salix, Juniperus, Betula, Populus and some herbs immigrated to Vest-Agder from the south or west, Ulmus, Quercus and possibly Tilia platyphylla from the south, Hippophaë and possibly Alnus from the east. It is suggested that Corylus may have come to the area with the first human inhabitants. Perhaps Tilia cordata has more immigration routes. Pinus and Calluna were among the early but not the first immigrants. Their immigration routes arc uncertain.     

3D Subsurface Characterization of Banded Iron Formation Mineralization using Large-Scale Gravity Data: A Case Study in Parts of Bharatpur,Dausa and Karauli Districts of Rajasthan,India

Our study interprets large-scale gravity data to delineate concealed banded iron formation (BIF) iron mineralization in India's Rajasthan province. The study area belongs to the Bharatpur, Dausa, and Karauli districts of Rajasthan. We measured 1462 gravity readings to understand the rock types, depth and geometry of the different rock formations in the proposed study area. We also collected representative lithologies from more than 100 locations in the study area and calculated their density values. The measured gravity datasets are investigated via qualitative (e.g., Bouguer anomaly, first derivative and second derivative) and quantitative (radially averaged power spectrum, 3D Euler deconvolution, and 3D inversion) approach. The qualitative methods suggest a general NE–SW orientation of the BIFs, controlled by the general trend of the study area's structural setting. The lithological contact between the Bhilwara and Vindhyan Supergroups is demarcated by a NE–SW trending steep gravity gradient zone. In this area, representative lithologies yield high densities (about 3.746 gm/cc), and the samples identified as BIF represent exploration targets for iron ore. We have also developed our own in-house 3D gravity inversion code in this study. A model space inversion algorithm is converted into a data space using the identity relationship. It makes inversion algorithm very user-friendly on conventional desktop computers. The outcomes from the 3D inversion suggest that the concealed iron ore thickens to the west. This interpretation is also in good correlation with Euler 3D deconvolution of the gravity data.