Kerala was mentioned six times in the 2006 edition of the Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which is its annual evaluation of a country's development status in terms of people's health, lifespan, knowledge, education and standards of living.
on the matter of water, Kerala finds mention on six occasions in HDR 2006. Even the anti-cola agitation finds mention thus: "In the Pallakad district of Kerala, the abstraction of groundwater by a multinational soft drink company has depleted the aquifer, dried up several wells and caused serious environmental damage."
The `Olavanna model' comes in for special mention: "In the 1980s Olavanna, a largely rural community in the Indian State of Kerala, pioneered a small village water supply system, inspiring reform of Kerala's rural water supply and sanitation programme. Across four districts, State and local governments are now co-operating with villages to extend the approach. The Olavanna model provides clean drinking water for 93,000 households - 60 per cent of whom live below the poverty line. As in other successful demand-driven models the capital costs are covered by government, with maintenance and management devolved to local community organizations."
The construction of wells has also attracted the HDR's attention. "In the Indian State of Kerala," it states, "research following implementation of seven rural water projects found that the incidence of waterborne diseases fell by half in the five years after the construction of deep wells, with no change in non-project areas."
Once again, in the arena of development, Kerala has helped debunk the myth that, in the words of the UNDP, "the deepening global water crisis is the result of scarcity". Rather, poverty, power and inequality are at the heart of the problem.
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