May 2024 update - field notes, conversations, education
Team notes from River Chambal + Classroom lectures + Public Speaking & more!
Introduction
It’s been a busy few months of exploring, learning, and sharing at Veditum. The team met up for a field trip to the Chambal river and a visit to Delhi - where we met up for chai and conversations with friends, collaborators and partners.
We’re now looking forward to our upcoming episode of Sediment Stories, reports and publications by our Moving Upstream Fellows and the Summer Internship 2024!
Read on for all our updates, and details on the things to watch out for! Please note that this might be a very long read with lots of updates!
Moving Upstream Project
Moving Upstream Ganga
On 3rd April 2024, our documentary, Moving Upstream: Ganga was made open access on YouTube. The documentary was filmed over 6 months on a 3000 km walk along River Ganga by Siddharth Agarwal (Veditum’s founder), as a part of our Moving Upstream project.
Watch the documentary at the link below and please share with your friends.
Here are a couple of reviews of the film to checkout:
Care for a walk — a 3,000-kilometre walk along the River Ganga?
by Subha J Rao, for Gaon ConnectionAn IITian’s walk by Ganga, from Bengal to Uttarakhand
by Manu Moudgil, for The Tribune
Moving Upstream: Luni Fellowship
As storytelling from the fellowship by our fellows takes form, we have some interesting stuff coming up in collaboration with the folks at Agami. Here’s the link to a teaser for the same.
Expect to see stories by our Moving Upstream: Luni fellows and this collaboration as part of our next newsletter!
India Sand Watch
Field trip to River Chambal, Delhi, River Yamuna
The Veditum team had a great learning experience on our recent visit to River Chambal in Dhaulpur. Our partners at Wildlife Conservation Trust were helpful to show us around and spot the wildlife in and around the river, their nesting sites, and we also discussed the impacts of sand mining on these habitat sites.
We were also joined by Ando Shah and Suraj Nair, our partners from the School of Information, UC Berkeley, who are collaborating with us to build Sand Mining Watch - a set of open-source tools which enables the production of high-resolution, real-time maps of sand mining activity in river basins across the world.
We gathered more data as case reports for India Sand Watch, and also did some ground-truthing exercises for this tool. You can read more about the tool and see some brilliant visualisations from our trip at this link: Sand Mining Watch
Further down in this newsletter, checkout a field report prepared by our team!
Delhi Data Sprint + Report Card
We had a great experience hosting our first in-person data sprint in Delhi with our partners at India Rivers Forum.
It was an active Sunday for us and the many participants who uploaded 150+ news report on sand mining from the states of Jammu & Kashmir, Delhi, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.
We were amazed by the energy and enthusiasm in the space, and you can check out the details of the sprint in the report card we made.
Above is a preview of the report card from the Delhi Data Sprint, to checkout the full report, go to this link: Delhi Data Sprint Report Card
Yamuna field trip
Some of our team members along with our partners also visited the River Yamuna where it forms the border between Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. In these parts, there have been close to 4000 complaints in Haryana of illegal mining in the Yamuna, in just the past 5 years. Read more here.
We spoke with community members affected by rampant illegal and unsustainable sand mining in these parts, and also tested out some of the predictions - which were accurate - from the Sand Mining Watch model mentioned earlier.
Sediment Stories
🌊 We're talking to researcher & ecologist Shishir Rao for the 2nd conversation of ‘Sediment Stories’. He will be sharing on the topic "Source to sink: why flowing water & sediments matter for the estuary".
📰 Sediment Stories is a series of conversations on sediments - from creation to extraction, hosted by the India Sand Watch team at Veditum India Foundation.
📆 Join us on Saturday, 11th May, 6pm IST
🔗 Register here: http://veditum.org/sedimentstories/
In subsequent conversations we will be inviting geologists, biologists, hydrologists, journalists, activists, administrators, and more. Share suggestions for speakers?
Support our work
If you like the work we do at Veditum, do consider making a tax deductible donation to support out work. No amount is small! Click the button below to make a donation.
You can also volunteer with Veditum, read more at this link.
Public Speaking
On our trip to Delhi we also interacted with students, academics and professionals, sharing our work and inviting them to collaborate / work with us.
We visited the TERI-SAS campus to speak with students about sand mining in India, and the role India Sand Watch plays in creating accountability in the sand mining sector. Siddharth and Aishani from our team spoke about our work and the ways in which students can get involved, and our partners from UC-Berkeley also presented about their work.
Siddharth also did a series of two talks at IIT-Delhi.
The first, was a seminar talk hosted by the School of Public Policy at IIT Delhi. This was co-ordinated thanks to our wonderful collaborator Prof. Pooja Prasad.
An introduction to rivers and an invitation to think about rivers differently, it was well received and sparked a lot of concern and curiosity among the students attending. We also spoke about the inception of Veditum and the India Sand Watch project, inspired by this experience and understanding of rivers.
The following day Siddharth interacted with students in a classroom session, where the specific focus was on policy interactions of our work and the importance of inclusive knowledge when proposing policy interventions.
If you would like to invite Veditum x India Sand Watch to speak at your school or university, write to us at sandwatch@veditum.org
Publishing
Our visit to Delhi and the Chambal river was the first time our otherwise-remote team got together! Aishani and Rhea, both Associates at Veditum, wrote a blog about their experience and thoughts from the trip.
Read it here - Notes from a field trip – Chambal, Crocodiles, Canoes, and Classrooms
Interesting / recommended / related reading for this edition
The Menace of Sand Mining in the Gangetic Plains: An Explainer
Read this short explainer by our collaborators at Wildlife Conservation TrustOur partners at India Rivers Forum recently started their newsletter, check them out and subscribe here.
Our partners from Manthan Adhyayan Kendra recently published a report titled “Cargo and Consequences: A Report on the Social and Environmental Implications of Shipping on Amba River - National Waterway -10”
Click on the report title to access it, and also checkout this video of their discussion about it.
People / Groups to follow and Opportunities
Shishir Rao is an engineer turned ecologist studying rivers in the Western Ghats; and he’s also our guest on the upcoming episode of Sediment Stories!
Follow Shishir on Instagram (@raorchestes) or check out his webpage (shishirtrao.weebly.com) for research and stories on river flow, ecology and people.India Rivers Forum and People’s Science Institute are offering a supported program for practitioners to learn about surface water quality assessment.
Details & registration is at this link: http://bit.ly/bmpsi24Our friends at Ooloi Labs are hiring for the position of a ‘weaver’ for their new initiative Doab. Sounds like a fantastic opportunity and you can checkout the details at this link: Job Description, Weaver, Doab, Ooloi Labs
Support our work
If you like the work we do at Veditum, do consider making a tax deductible donation to support out work. No amount is small! Click the button below to make a donation.
You can also volunteer with Veditum, read more at this link.
Thank you for reading through! If you want to get in touch with us, email at contact@veditum.org
We’ll be back in a month with more updates, including stories, data visualisations, and news about events & opportunities. Until then, take care and follow us on social media if you’re active on these platforms:
VEDITUM : Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Linkedin | YouTube
MOVING UPSTREAM: Twitter | Facebook | Instagram
INDIA SAND WATCH: Twitter | Facebook | Instagram
Warmly,
Team Veditum