Tribal Women
The life style of tribal people is in tune with the ecosystem and align with nature and natural resources. Our country has wide ranging diversity in nature and natural resources and possess a varied tribal population inhabiting under-developed areas which are remote and having low density of population.
Understanding of their life style and making them aware of modern development benefits is a unique territory of two-way learning and mutual benefit. To integrate them to a higher social stratum is the need of the hour and to empower them with bio resources-based entrepreneurship.
Tribal people have undocumented high-quality knowledge of local natural resources and remedies. Research can make careful observations and detailed documentation of traditional knowledge of tribal. These observations may be scientific, replicable and precise. The wealth of tribal knowledge of medicinal and other useful biota points to a great potential for research and the discovery of new drugs to fight diseases.
Descriptive research making careful observations and detailed documentation of ethnobotanical knowledge based on bio economy will be of special interest. One such recent study in Javvadu hill tribes of Tamil Nadu is successfully completed recently.
Water Quality
Water quality concern is going to precede water availability in future, as surface and groundwater resources shrink, at least in urban environments. Water quality determines the suitability of the water for any particular use including domestic and drinking needs. Lack of adequate management and natural causes are responsible for the present situation now.
In these days of digital networked world, it is a surprise that sufficient data on water and its quality is not forthcoming in public domain. Most scientific data on natural resources available today are largely from State or Central government agencies and are not in a readily usable form.
But areas such as weather, agriculture, and health that have embraced digital tools are popular today. However, in some disciplines infusion of current technologies are yet to make an impact. Water and water quality are one such area today.
Groundwater meets unknown but significant quantity of urban domestic water needs, especially the middle and lower economic sections of the society.
Today, cities and towns with their growing population, vertical growth, widening demand – water supply gap and fluctuations of annual monsoon, is subjected to seasonal water stress. This has prompted drilling more borewells, that increased groundwater extraction, which however eventually lead to poor yields.
Over exploitation not only decline bore well yields and leave open wells dry, but can also decrease the quality of groundwater. Water quality issues will restrict use of water for drinking, cooking and washing which are major uses of groundwater in urban areas. Groundwater quality is going to precede among urban water supply issues in future.