Water Pollution

I have been residing in Bangalore for as long as 20 years. Although I am a Malayalee, I would call Bangalore my home instead of Kerala because I have spent a major part of my life here and I’m emotionally attached to this place. I have seen a lot of changes in Bangalore in these past 20 years. It was a rapid change that one couldn’t imagine how technology, lifestyle, infrastructure etc. went to a whole new level. But as we were going towards advancement we were forgetting the sustainable development. I remember when I was a kid and during December there used to be fog and we used to play around blowing our breadth to see the fog coming out of our mouth like smoke. But sadly the kids of this generation cannot witness such beauty. I feel ashamed to call my city ‘Garden City’. I took pride in saying it around 10-15 years back but not anymore. Now the city I love is facing a terrible issue. ‘Water’, yes water is the number one problem. It is such a big issue that if we don’t do anything about it now Bangalore could be the second city in the world to run out of water after Cape Town very soon. Many people living in Bangalore use tankers to fill their tanks costing really high. We have dug so many borewells that there is no more water available underground even if we dig till 1500ft underground. It’s not just the depletion of water. It’s the water pollution that causes harm to the environment around.

Back around 35 years back Bangalore had 262 lakes. If we date back to the 16^th century Kempegowda had built many lakes for the requirement of the geography of Bangalore. But due to drastic development of real estate and advancement of urbanization and industries these lakes have been reduced to a very small scale and the few surviving ones are getting polluted. Let’s take Bellandur lake. It is one of the largest lake in Bangalore and the most polluted one with dangerous chemical substances in it. As a matter of fact the river cannot be seen, it is completely covered with 10ft high of snow like substance, the term used is ‘froth’.  The government’s idea of sluice gate did not work because due to rains the water just rushes through causing havoc to the commuters on road and residents living near by. This froth flies around due to wind and falls on commuters which causes skin diseases and other infections. At one point it was recorded that there was a fire coming out of this lake and the smoke could be seen at a distance. These pollutions are caused by the dumping of industrial waste on these rivers.

The water quality is dictated by natural conditions, mans activities and proper disposal waste. But it’s majorly caused by mans activities land encroachment, new projects, altering the flow of rivers and streams and changing their direction and dumping waste into water beds. Although this article is based in the US it can be related to the previous article of Bellandur lake and how industries are dumping industrial waste into the lake. An economy can go down due to this because without waer life cannot sustain and that particular geography becomes uninhabitable or else a lot of money should be invested in building long pipe line for borrowing etc. But it is not that anything can’t be done. Its just that politicians and policy makers have put water conservation or climate change as least of their priorities due to their unending greed.

A BBC documentary called “Blue Planet - 2” released in a series of episodes shows how plastic waste in ocean is harming the marine life. In fact the production crew of this documentary witnessed many instances of plastic dumps in the ocean while they were in their shooting process. Marine life like fish, sea mammals and seabirds are being harmed and executed by plastic contamination, and its it trusted that 700 species could go wiped out as a result of it. the estimates recommend that no less than 267 species worldwide have been influenced, including 84% of ocean turtle species, 44% of all seabird species and 43% of all marine well evolved creature species, however there are likely some more. Deaths are mostly caused by ingestion of plastics, starvation, suffocation, contamination, entanglement and suffocation. These tiny bits of plastic can draw in poisonous synthetic concoctions discharged by industry and farming decades back, the grouping of which additionally increments up the natural food chain. Plastic is cheap and adaptable, making it perfect for some applications, however a large number of its helpful characteristics have prompted it turning into a natural issue. The human population has built up an expendable way of life: it is assessed that half of plastics are utilized once before being discarded. Plastic is a significant asset yet dirtying the planet with it is unacceptable and unsustainable.

It is accounted that 75% to 80% of water contamination is caused by the domestic sewage. Squander from the ventures like, sugar, material, electroplating, pesticides, mash and paper are dirtying the water. Expansive measure of domestic sewage is depleted in to waterway and the greater part of the sewage is untreated. Domestic sewage contains toxins, strong solid waste, plastic litters and bacterial contaminants and these dangerous materials causes water contamination. Diverse mechanical gushing that is depleted in to waterway without treatment is the significant reason for water contamination. Unsafe material released from the industries is in charge of surface water and ground water tainting. Contaminant relies on the idea of ventures. Dangerous metals enter in to water and decreased the nature of water. 25% contamination is caused by the industries and is more unsafe. Low quality water destroys the yield production and contaminates our food which is dangerous for marine life and human life. Contaminations bother the food chain and substantial metals, particularly iron influences the respiratory organs of fishes. An iron obstruct in to gills, it is deadly to fishes, when these fishes are eaten by humans it prompts the real medical problem. Metal tainted water leads to baldness, liver cirrhosis, renal failure and neural disorder.

These problems can be tackled if there is enough awareness , public pressuring the government, choosing representatives who believe in climate change and vote for sustainable development. The problem is the vast majority neglecting this issue and politicians not doing anything about this due to their greed for money. If a change is not started any moment to tackle these issues, the next generation won’t have a planet to live. 

References:-

E. (Ed.). (2018, September 26). Two rains are enough for Bellandur lake to froth Read more at: //economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/65960032.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst. The Economic Times. Retrieved December 4, 2018, from https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/two-rains-are-enough-for-bellandur-lake-to-froth/articleshow/65960032.cms

Bhasthi, D. (2017, March 1). City of burning lakes: Experts fear Bangalore will be uninhabitable by 2025. The Guardian. Retrieved December 4, 2018, from https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/mar/01/burning-lakes-experts-fear-bangalore-uninhabitable-2025

Chandrashekar, J. S., & K. B. (2003). Impact of urbanization on Bellandur Lake, Bangalore - A case study. Journal of Environmental Biology,223-227. Retrieved December 4, 2018, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8449200_Impact_of_urbanization_on_Bellandur_Lake_Bangalore_-_A_case_study.

Hennigan, R. (1969). Water Pollution. BioScience, 19(11), 976-978. doi:10.2307/1294973

Smith, K. T. (Ed.). (2018, May 16). How Plastic Pollution is Affecting the Ocean Wildlife. Retrieved December 4, 2018, from https://www.azocleantech.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=729

M., M., A., S., N., S., . . . M. (2017). Water pollution and human health. Environmental Risk Assessment and Remediation,1(3). doi:10.4066/2529-8046.100020

SAINT JOHN, THE BAPTIST

John the baptist was an itinerant preacher in the Holy Bible. John is described as having the unique practice of baptism for the forgiveness of sins. He also baptised  Jesus near the river Jordan. He was the son of Zechariah and Elizabeth, Mary’s aunt. The Gospel of Luke includes an account of John’s infancy, introducing him as the son of Zecharaiah, an old man, and his wife Elizabeth, who was barren.  According to this account, the birth of John was foretold by the angel Gabriel to Zechariah, while Zechariah was performing his functions as a priest in the temple of Jerusalem.

In the gospel of Mark, John the baptist is described as wearing clothes of camel’s hair, living on locusts and wild honey. He has also been described in the words of Isaiah as “voice of one crying aloud in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” He appeared preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. He is the one who made people ready for the coming of the Messaiah. He preached saying “ After me comes he who is mightier than I, the thong of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. I have baptised you with water; but he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit.”

Herod had seized John and bound him and put him in prison, for the sake of herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because John said to him that it was not right for him to have Herodias. Herod wanted to put John to death but he feared the people who held him to be a prophet. When Herod’s birthday came, the daughter of Herodias danced before the company and pleased Herod. So he promised her woth an oath to give her whatever she wished. Prompted by her mother herodias, she asked for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. The king was helpless because of his oath and ordered that John the baptist be beheaded in the prison and his head was brought on a platter.

The Roman Catholic Church commemorates St. John the Baptist on two feast days:

• June 24 – Nativity of St. John the Baptist
• August 29 – Beheading of St. John the Baptist.

St. John the Baptist has been one of the saints for known for his humility and his ministry.

BBS CAMP

1 week of BBS(bethany bible studies) camp in singsandra st.john's church, with bro.Geevarghese, bro.Boni matthew, and bro.Matthew prafool went on well.
Thanks to headmisstress mrs. Biji aunty, and all the mathrusamaj members.
Thanks to the sponsors and our vicar fr.Joshy.
Thanks for all the participation. 

THANK YOU ALL!!

ANANDHU SATYAN HAS REACHED HOME SAFELY ON 26/2/2013, 8:00 PM.

THANK YOU ALL FOR SHARING HIS PHOTO'S AND THE PRAYER'S.

Grabbing Water From Future Generations

This piece is part of Water Grabbers: A Global Rush on Freshwater, a special National Geographic Freshwater News series on how grabbing land—and water—from poor people, desperate governments, and future generations threatens global food security, environmental sustainability, and local cultures.

Suresh Ponnusami sat back on his porch by the road south of the Indian textile town of Tirupur. He was not rich, but for the owner of a two-acre farm in the backwoods of a developing country he was doing rather well. He had a TV, a car, and a maid to bring him drinks and ensure his traditional white Indian robes were freshly laundered every morning.

The source of his wealth, he said, was a large water reservoir beside his house. And as we chatted, a tanker drew up on the road. The driver dropped a large pipe from his vehicle into the reservoir and began sucking up the contents.

Ponnusami explained: "I no longer grow crops, I farm water. The tankers come about ten times a day. I don't have to do anything except keep my reservoir full." To do that, he had drilled boreholes deep into the rocks beneath his fields, and inserted pumps that brought water to the surface 24 hours a day. He sold every tanker load for about four dollars. "It's a good living, and it's risk-free," he said. "While the water lasts."

A neighbor told me she does the same thing. Water mining was the local industry. But, she said, "every day the water is reducing. We drilled two new boreholes a few weeks ago and one has already failed."

Surely this is madness, I suggested. Why not go back to real farming before the wells run dry? "If everybody did that, it would be well and good," she agreed. "But they don't. We are all trying to make as much money as we can before the water runs out."

Ponnusami and his neighbors were selling water to dyeing and bleaching factories in Tirupur. The factories once got their water from a giant reservoir on southern India's biggest river, the Kaveri (see picture). But the Kaveri was now being pumped dry by farmers and industry farther upstream. The reservoir was nearly empty most of the year. So the factories had taken to buying up underground water from local farmers.

It is a trade that is growing all over India—and all over the world.

Draining Fossil Aquifers

We are used to thinking of water as a renewable resource. However much we waste and abuse it, the rains will come again and the rivers and reservoirs will refill. Except during droughts, this is true for water at the surface. But not underground. As we pump more and more rivers dry, the world is increasingly dependent on subterranean water. That is water stored by nature in the pores of rocks, often for thousands of years, before we began to tap it with our drills and pumps.

We are emptying these giant natural reservoirs far faster than the rains can refill them. The water tables are falling, the wells have to be dug ever deeper, and the pumps must be ever bigger. We are mining water now that should be the birthright of future generations.

In India, the water is being taken for industry, for cities, and especially for agriculture. Once a country of widespread famine, India has seen an agricultural revolution in the past half century. India now produces enough food to feed all its people; the fact that many Indians still go hungry today is an economic and political puzzle, because the country exports rice.

But that may not last. Researchers estimate that a quarter of India's food is irrigated with underground water that nature is not replacing. The revolution is living on borrowed water and borrowed time. Who will feed India when the water runs out?

Nobody knows how much water is buried beneath our feet. But we do know that the reserves are being emptied. The crisis is global and growing, but remains largely out of sight and out of mind.

The latest estimate, published in the journal Water Resources Research this year, is that India alone is pumping out some 46 cubic miles (190 cubic kilometers) of water a year from below ground, while nature is refilling only 29 cubic miles (120 cubic kilometers), a shortfall of 17 cubic miles (70 cubic kilometers) per year. A cubic kilometer is 264.2 billion gallons, or about enough water to fill 400,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.

Close behind India, Pakistan is overpumping by 8.4 cubic miles (35 cubic kilometers), the United States by 7.2 cubic miles (30 cubic kilometers), and China and Iran by 4.8 cubic miles (20 cubic kilometers) each per year. Globally, the shortfall is about 60 cubic miles (250 cubic kilometers) per year, more than three times the rate half a century ago. Egypt, Uzbekistan, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Australia, Israel, and others are all pumping up their water at least 50 percent faster than the rains replenish. In some places, water that you could once bring to the surface with a bucket on a short rope is now a mile or more down.

Farming's Big Thirst

Overwhelmingly, the problem is agriculture. Farming takes two-thirds of all the water we grab from nature, but that figure rises to 90 percent in many of the driest and most water-stressed regions.

This cannot go on, as the United States is already discovering. For more than half a century now, farmers have been pumping out one of the world's greatest underwater reserves, the Ogallala aquifer, which stretches beneath the High Plains from Texas to South Dakota. The pumping began in order to revive the plains after the horrors of the 1930s Dust Bowl. By the 1970s there were 200,000 water wells, supplying more than a third of the U.S.'s irrigated fields.

For a while it was a huge success. In a good year, the High Plains produced three-quarters of the wheat traded on international markets, restocking Russian grain stores and feeding millions of starving Africans. But the Ogallala water is drawing down, many wells are going dry, and the output of the pumps has halved. A quarter of the aquifer is gone in parts of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, and over wide areas the water table has fallen by more than 100 feet. In some places, the sagebrush is returning because farmers are giving up on irrigated planting. (See "That Sinking Feeling About Groundwater in Texas.")

Other countries are heading in the same direction. Water tables are falling by more than a meter a year beneath the North China Plain, the breadbasket of the most populous nation on Earth. Saudi Arabia has almost pumped dry a vast water reserve beneath the desert in just 40 years.

Libya is doing the same beneath the Sahara. Muammar Qaddafi, Libya's late ruler, spent $30 billion of his country's oil revenues on giant pump fields in the desert, and a 2,000-mile (3,200-kilometer) network of pipes to bring underground water that is thousands of years old to coastal farms. Even though it was bombed by NATO forces last year, what Qaddafi called the Great Manmade River Project appears to still be functioning. But nature will eventually accomplish what the bombs did not. Water tables are dropping, pumping is getting harder, and the water is getting saltier.

Soon we may have a full global picture of how the world's underground water reserves are disappearing. Researchers are using NASA's GRACE satellite, which measures changes in the Earth's gravity field, to spot where the pores in rocks are being emptied of water. Jay Famiglietti, an earth science professor at the University of California, Irvine, is analyzing the findings. He says water security will soon rival energy security as the fastest-rising issue on the global geopolitical agenda.

More and more countries are so short of water for farming that they can feed their citizens only by importing crops grown using someone else's water. But the number of countries with spare water to export in this way is diminishing. The fear is that as the world's water supplies run on empty, the world's stomachs will as well.

Often, even before the water runs out, the pumps start to bring up water that is salty or toxic. In parts of India, there are epidemics of fluoride poisoning caused by drinking water containing high levels of this natural compound, which dissolves from hard rocks beneath water-bearing strata. I have seen villages full of severely disabled children, and adults suffering muscle degeneration, organ failure, and cancer caused by these poisons. Some communities call it "the devil's water."

We should not be doing this, says Brian Richter, freshwater strategist at The Nature Conservancy. "Falling groundwater levels are the bellwethers of the unsustainability of our water use," Richter said. "We're raiding our savings accounts with no payback plan."

We should not be stealing water from future generations, Richter said. We should instead use underground water sparingly and with caution.

Seeking Solutions

This can be done, starting with agriculture. Scientists are already working on new varieties of crops that need much less water to grow. And technologists are coming up with less wasteful ways to irrigate those crops. (See "Saving a River, One Farm at a Time.")

The truth is that, despite growing shortages, water is still usually so cheap that it is often wasted. The majority of the world's farmers irrigate simply by flooding their fields. But only a fraction of that water gets absorbed by the plants. Some of it percolates underground and can eventually be pumped to the surface again. But much of it is lost to evaporation.

Even spraying from pivots loses huge amounts of water to the air, where it may get carried out to sea or otherwise lost to local use. So the race is on to develop cheap drip irrigation, in which water is distributed across fields in pipes and dripped into the soil close to plant roots. That way we may be able to save our underground water reserves for future generations.

Meanwhile, communities across the world are running out of water. Where are things worst? The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) nominates the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian enclave on the shores of the Mediterranean between Israel and Egypt. It looks as though it will become the first territory in the world to lose its only water supply.

Gaza has no rivers. It cannot afford desalinated seawater. So its 1.7 million inhabitants drink from the underground reserves. But pumping is being done at three times the recharge rate, water tables are falling fast, and what comes through the wells is increasingly contaminated by seawater seeping into the emptying rocks. A UN report this year said Gaza's water probably will be undrinkable by 2016. What then?

Gaza is an extreme case. And water is only one of its many problems. But it offers a warning for the world. It shows what can happen as the water runs out—what will happen in many other places if we continue to steal water from our children and their children.

Fred Pearce is a journalist and author on environmental science. His books include When the Rivers Run Dry and The Land Grabbers, both for Beacon Press, Boston. He writes regularly for New Scientist magazine, Yale Environment 360, and The Guardian, and has been published by Nature andThe Washington Post.

ABORTION-BREAST CANCER LINK REAL, WIDELY IGNORED

Karen Malec of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer tells the studies  conducted in France and China between 2009-2011 confirm that breast cancer cases are related to the number of abortions a woman has. The authors examined information on disease diagnosis, demographics, medical history, and reproductive characteristics of the patients involved. They also looked at a number of other factors.

"There have been 71 studies now that have been published, epidemiological studies showing a statistical relationship between having an abortion and having an increased breast cancer risk," Malec notes.

Even so, she says, most women remain uninformed about it because many cancer-related not-for-profit organizations look the other way.

"They are ignoring it, and they're misrepresenting the research," the pro-lifer laments. "It's simply not good for fundraising to tell women that their abortions may be responsible for their breast cancers. It's a very emotional issue."

At the same time, the standard medical text shows that childbearing protects women because it has a significant defensive effect. Dr. Joel Brind, a professor at Baruch College in New York City, has compiled a statistical review of previous studies confirming the link between abortion and breast cancer, and the French and Chinese studies of late tend to confirm his findings.

2013

HAPPY  NEW  YEAR !!!!!!!!

WELCOME 2013 !!!!!!!!!!!!