( English, Hindi / 23 min )
Director : Aparajita Gogoi and Saurabh Rawla
Production Co. : Development Alternatives
| Films
on Water Issues
|
MONSOON – The Two Faces
of Indra
(
English, Hindi / 23 min )
Director : Aparajita Gogoi and
Saurabh Rawla
Production Co. : Development Alternatives
Fifty years of independence and seventy percent of India’s agriculture still depend on the monsoon rains. Indian agriculture is rain-fed and thus those multitudes of farmers, marginal and not-so-marginal, all depend on the summer showers. Food production continues to be at the mercy of the vagaries of the monsoon rain. A generous monsoon leads to devastating floods and a reticent monsoon to dry spells, drought, famine and starvation. The film concludes on the note that water harvesting can spell an end to the woes of the farmer caused by an unreliable and unpredictable monsoon.
River of Sand
( English / 53 min. )
Country : Mali
Production Co. : Central
TV
Producer / Director : Bruno
Sorrentino
TV news coverage of the great droughts of the 1970s and 1980
in the African Sahel mobilized a huge wave of international sympathy and foreign
aid flooded into the region where twenty years later 26 million people face
starvation due to drought, overgrazing and famine. In River of Sand, three aid
projects battle with a deteriorating environment in a remote corner of northern
Mali, the inner delta and lake district of the great river Niger. The film
travels north from the river and its colorful bird life, up to the very edge of
the Sahara, where moving sands threaten to engulf entire communities and the
lake, in west Africa, is now a dried – out desert plain.
WATER WARS
Production Co. : BBC
Producer: Michael Waldman
Water Wars: To the Last Drop
( English / 50
min. )
Country : Middle East
To the Last Drop focuses on the Middle East, where every
conflict in the region is aggravated by water disputes. Since the West Bank and
the Golan Height contain water resources vital to Israel, water is one of the
key factors blocking a settlement of the Palestinian issue.
Water Wars: Good as
Gold
( English
/ 50 min. )
Country : United States
Good as Gold focuses on the United States, where water is primarily a marketable product: something that a few people have and a lot of people want.
Water Wars: The
Giver of Life
( English / 50 min. )
Country : Central Asia
The Giver of Life focuses on the Islamic countries of the former Soviet Central Asia where the fate of the disappearing Aral Sea is described as a catastrophe at par with Chernobyl. Irrigation schemes to feed the thirsty cotton fields of Uzbekistan and Kazakhastan are to blame.
Khara Pani Meetha Pani
There is an acute shortage of drinking water especially in the coastal areas of this country. The water is generally too salty to be drinkable. In Tamil Nadu, the T.N. Water Supply and Drainage Board (TNWSDB) is responsible for providing good water.
Of the 34 thousand bastis in the state, 10 thousand don’t get good water. One such village is the Utthal gram in Chinaiyanna district – 20 kms from Chennai. Here, there are 50 households, about 500 people, who had to bring water from the pipeline 5 hours away from the village and here too, the water available was not enough.
The TNWSDB had set up a desalination plant here in 1985 which has now solved all their water problems. The technology was developed at Bharnagar Central Salt Marine Research Institute. TNWSDB plans to set up similar desalination plants in villages that fulfill certain predefined criteria.
Pani
(Water)
(
English, Hindi / 37 min. )
Country : India
Producer/ Director : Sumitra Bhave
In a village in rural India, the women spend hours every day finding water. Young or old, pregnant or nursing young babies, they make their daily trek across a stony wasteland to fill their pitchers from the dirty pool at the bottom of a waterhole. Meanwhile, the village menfolk drink, gamble, quarrel and order their wives about. "Men - what men! Devils! Women’s lives are very cheap," complains Kaki, a real-life village grandmother, and the undisputed heroine of Sumitra Bhave’s engaging morality tale on the hidden strengths of Indian women. Inspired by a group of local activists and urged on by Kaki and her childhood recollection of a spring near the village, the women from a collective and dig a new well to provide water for their families. q
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