K. N. Prudhvi Raju

Water in Ancient Indian Perspective and Ponds of Varanasi as Water Harvesting Structures

Rivers and river-valleys had been centres of development of civilisation. The importance of water as a precious resource had been realised by all civilisations to sustain life on earth. In ancient texts of India, it has been said, “where there is water, there is food; where there is food, there is life”. What was once a ubiquitous resource has become scarce and even in places where water is everywhere, it had become scarcer because of quality deterioration. The causes for the present state of affairs are: population increase, industrialisation, urbanisation, poor governance and management and peoples’ apathy and ignorance.

A note on boundaries in atlas maps

Thematic maps at very small scales like 1:1 million, 1:10 million and smaller in various atlases show smooth boundaries of areal units as well as linear features. Atlas maps are normally meant for visualization of distributional patterns. But many users believe that the boundaries are extracted/delineated/mapped at larger scales and are then reduced to go into atlases or into various publications and hence are taken to be reasonably accurate as the maps carry a stamp of premier map making organizations and/or publishers. Problem arises when the boundaries, both political as well as of natural units, are borrowed and linear or areal measurements are made from them for analysis of any thematic units in them. In a recent case, it so happened with the authors involved in a piece of work connected with Indus and Ganga-Yamuna river basins within Indian political boundary, the basin boundaries from a map at 1:14 million scale published in National Atlas and Thematic Mapping Organization Atlas (NATMO, 1999) are borrowed for some