Nineteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

Most of the cities in the Central Indian region traditionally had a large number of water bodies catering to the requirements of urban areas. While some of these urban water bodies were big enough to retain water throughout the year, others were like small tanks, i.e., low lying areas that accumulate water during the monsoon and are typically dry in the summers. The city of Jabalpur, which is located very close to the geographical centre of India, had 36 urban water bodies (referred to as ‘Taals’) within the limits of the municipal area; which today are under great environmental stress due to pollution from various sources. A number of slums surrounding these water bodies discharge their sewage and silage into the existing drainage network of the area, which ultimately finds their way into these water bodies through open drains. This paper seeks to address the important issue of conservation as well as restoration of these urban water bodies of Jabalpur city in India. The authors review the existing legal as well as governance provisions of India for urban water-body conservation; and analyze the characteristics and interdependencies of the existing water bodies of Jabalpur with their surroundings, while also classifying them appropriately with respect to their physical and environmental parameters. Subsequently, the paper proposes appropriate spatial spatial planning strategies/interventions that can be implemented to preserve and restore these waterbodies, thus seeking to address an issue that also plagues many other urban areas of India and of SouthEast Asian Countries.

Presenters

Anugrah Anilkumar Nagaich
Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture and Planning, Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology, Madhya Pradesh, India

Navneet Munoth
Assistant Professor, Architecture and Planning, MANIT, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India