Don’t reclaim garden plan for east coast

Despite the objections, the Mumbai Port Trust (MbPT) has included a plan to create a 145-hectare London’s Hyde Park-like central garden near Haji Bunder in south Mumbai, by reclaiming 93ha, in its revised plan for revamp of the eastern waterfront submitted to the Maharashtra government. Urban planners and activists continue to oppose the plan to reclaim space to provide a garden.

The MbPT has got a go-ahead for the garden plan from the Central Water and Power Research Station (CWPRS), Pune. In its report, MbPT stated: “The 145-hectare garden shall be the largest urban park on Mumbai’s seafront. The CWPRS has certified that the reclamation in this shape will have minimal effect on waterfront facilities of MbPT.”

AA Purohit from CWPRS, who conducted the study, said he will not be able to comment on the research unless permitted by the director.[Readmore]

Pocket App Review – Best Offline Article Reader App

Pocket is an article reader app which lets you save articles to read later, even offline and provides a distraction-free reading experience. The app is available for Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Kobo eReaders, Kindle Fire, and even Web Browsers.

The application was originally designed for computers only but later it was released for other platforms and other operating systems also. Earlier, Pocket app was named “Read it Later” but later it rebranded itself in 2012.

Features of Pocket

• Reading Time Estimates
• Highlighting
• Listening to Articles
• Discover New Articles
• Organize Articles with Tags
• Browser Extension
• Sharing Articles with Your Friend. [Readmore]

Internet privacy: the apps that protect you from your apps

Tech companies don’t have favourite songs, but if they did, they would all pick Radiohead’s Just – “You do it to yourself, you do/ And that’s what really hurts,” they would croon, staring their users dead in the eye. And strictly speaking, they’d be right: many of the worst excesses of the industry are, technically, optional. The world isn’t actually a binary choice between living in a surveillance state and opting out of all technological development since the turn of the millennium. You can opt out – you just have to know how.[Readmore]

Jal Shakti ministry will assist Raj in developing water, crop system 

Jaipur: The Union Jal Shakti ministry will assist Rajasthan in developing its state-specific Integrated Water and Crop IInformation and Management system (IWCIMS) on pilot basis.

The state-specific system will enable the state to have a repository of satellite images of the ground and surface water bodies, role of artificial intelligence in managing water resources, scientific management of dams and creating buffer zones to meet drought-like situations. It will be done with the help of central agencies like Isro, CAZRI in Jodhpur to name a few. [Readmore]

Jal Shakti Minister lauds success of Swachh Bharat, Says Govt to fulfil Jal Jeevan Mission by 2024

New Delhi: Union Minister of Jal Shakti, Gajendra Singh Shekhawat has said that the Government is taking all-out efforts to provide safe piped drinking water supply to all households in the country by 2024.

Inaugurating the one-day National Conference on ‘Provision of Potable Drinking Water in Quality-Affected Areas’, he said that the programme is being implemented in Mission mode as declared by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his Independence Day speech from the ramparts of the Red Fort last year.

Shekhawat stated that nearly 73 years after Independence only 18.33% of rural households or 3.27 crore out of around 18 crore rural households in the country have piped water connection. Globally, India is ranked a lowly 120 in terms of water quality parameters. [Readmore]

NHP: State improves ranking

Kerala has improved its ranking in the National Hydrology Project (NHP) by bagging the eighth spot at the national level in the surface water category.

The results of the NHP mid-term review were declared in New Delhi on Tuesday. The State had stood 13th in the previous assessment, according to the State Water Resources Department. The rankings are based on criteria such as assessment of annual rainfall and water flow in rivers, real-time data collection, conduct of training programmes and data digitisation. Kerala scored 49.3 points out of 100 to secure the eighth position.

On the other hand, in the groundwater category, Kerala has been relegated to the 24th position, which fell in the ‘unsatisfactory’ list in the NHP rankings.[readmore]