BISHKEK (Asia Water Wire) – There are 3,500 rivers, 2,000 lakes and more than 5,000 supply wells in Kyrgyzstan that produce 15 litres of underground water per second. That should be more than enough for the country’s five million people, but this Central Asian country finds itself grappling with the lack of potable water.

   The problem has been getting worse over the last 15 years, as residents turn to using subsoil water to meet their needs, even if these sources are often polluted.

ALMATY, Kazakhstan (Asia Water Wire) – The five Central Asian countries are unlikely to be able to produce enough food for themselves unless they change their unsustainable irrigation systems, experts in the region say.

   Most of Central Asia -- Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan -- comprises desert, so that agriculture is possible only in plots with uninterrupted water supply. 

Kiyoshi Noda is flanked by Kazuko and Shigeichi Fukao in front of their snow covered rice field in Ichihara-cho.

EIGENJI, Japan (Asia Water Wire) - Despite winning a landmark court ruling in December, residents of Higashi-Omi village, some 500 kilometres west of Tokyo, brave heavy snow and freezing winds to attend meetings and devise strategies to protect their beloved Echigawa river from the planned construction of a dam.

Reed bed panels collect and treat grey water before being used in the school toilets.

ALMATY, Kazakhstan (Asia Water Wire) – Irrigated agriculture, which used to be the secret of Central Asian countries’ prosperity, is now turning into a nightmare for the region’s environmentalists. 

   The exhaustive use of water for irrigation, especially in the latter half of the 20th century when irrigation was expanded to about 150,000 hectares of new farmland, has doubled the withdrawal of water from the region’s rivers.

KATHMANDU (Asia Water Wire) - Chitra Shrestha, a first-grader at Balpremi School in Kathmandu Valley's Thimi municipality, faced embarrassing moments in the past when he went to the school toilet only to find that there was no water.

In a triumph of fish breeding, WorldFish has developed a better tilapia, known as GIFT, to help farmers raise fish that are bigger and grow faster. The tilapia, often called the aquatic chicken, is the most widely farmed fish in the tropics. It is a perchlike member of the Cichlid family. It originated in Africa, but is now farmed extensively in Asia.

While every human being needs water to survive, ironically the most frequent diseases are related to poor water supply and sanitation.

Diarrhoea - About 4 billion cases of diarrhoea per year cause 2.2 million deaths, mostly among children under five.

Intestinal worms infect about 10% of the population of the developing world and, depending upon the severity of the infection, lead to malnutrition, anaemia or retarded growth

The Songhua riverbank beside Jilin city, China's Jilin province on Nov. 22, nine days after the blast at the PetroChina chemical plant. The accident forced Harbin, the tenth-largest city in mainland China with a population of 3.8 million, to shut off its water supply for four days.
Photo by Sun Xin, China Features for IPS

BEIJING (Asia Water Wire) - Water security is no longer an imaginary challenge for the China’s city officials to  contemplate, after the shutdown of water supply in Harbin, capital of the north-eastern province of Heilongjiang, more than a week ago.

CHIRCHIK CITY,  Uzbekistan (Asia Water Wire) -- Brand new ‘dachas’ or  summer cottages line the Koksu River near the Tien Shan mountains,  from where the river heads north   for about 57 kilometres before it  joins the Chirchuk, a tributary of the Syr Darya.

   In the mountains, villagers in the surrounding settlements drink  directly from the Koksu and use its waters for irrigating their fields.