Dams, Rivers & People · Fish, Fisheries, Fisherfolk

DRP 300326: Sad state of migratory Riverine fish in India

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Dam floods · Floods · Hydropower · Indus · Ravi River

Ravi ka Kinara Kaisa hai? River Ravi through its people

Flowing under many names: Vedic Parushni, Puranic Iravati, Greek Hydraotes, River Ravi is arguably the most storied of the five rivers meeting the Indus.

Ravi’s flow from the glacial heights of Himalayas to the fertile plains of Punjab has been embellished in songs and stories for centuries. Heth Vage Ravi Dariya or “Below flows the River Ravi” is a ubiquitous phrase in songs and poems.[1] On the banks of Ranjit Sagar Dam on Ravi, Manbhavan Singh Kahlon, himself a poet-activist muses, “We Punjabis have always written poetry around our rivers. Perhaps even too much, I sometimes think. But most of Ravi’s poetry has been left back in Pakistan.” Pakistan, on the other hand, thinks most of Ravi’s water has been left back in India.

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Climate Change · Dams, Rivers & People · Himalayas

DRP 230326: Small Hydro environment friendly and help community development?

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Dams, Rivers & People

DRP 160326: Urgent need for adaptive reservoir management in India

(Feature Image: Vyasi dam on Yamuna river in Uttarakhand. Bhim Singh Rawat/SANDRP)

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Dams, Rivers & People

DRP 090326: Polavaram Dam Safety questioned

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Dams, Rivers & People

DRP 020326: NDMA Compendium on Disaster Case studies welcome, what about accountability?

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Art, Literature, Culture · Indus · River Pollution

Jhelum and Pashmina: A River Woven into a Shawl

Quae loca fabulosus lambit Hydaspes
What places the magnificent Jhelum washes!

Ode 1.22, Horace, Circa 3rd BC[i]

With these lines begins M. Aurel Stein’s authoritative Ancient Geography of Kashmir, written in 1899.[ii] Stein was deeply smitten by Kashmir and its rivers and was the first to translate Kalhana’s epic Rajatarangini—literally River of the Kings—into English[iii].

Jhelum—or Behat, Vyeth, Vitasta, Hydaspes—has indeed washed some legendary places like Srinagar, Baramulla, Anantnag and Sopore. But it has also “washed” something very particular, something that is as much the fruit of the Jhelum as it is of Kashmir itself: the feather-light Pashmina shawl.

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Dams, Rivers & People

DRP 160226: National River Research Centre Welcome, will it help the cause of rivers?

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Dams, Rivers & People

DRP 090226: NGT Critiques Shoddy CGWA report

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Dams, Rivers & People

DRP 020226: Karnataka High Court Monitored Probe into sand mining menace?

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