World wide floods are much more frequent, wider and devastating than in former times where societies developed slower and in a more robust way. This certainly holds true for India with its distinctive rainfall patterns and unprecedented urban expansion: each year, heavy downpours exert in extensive flood damage to life and property. Forty million hectares of land, roughly one-eighth of the country's geographical area, is prone to floods One of the causes contributing to India’s flood vulnerability is a lack of appropriate functioning of flood protection measures such as embankments, dams, drainage channels, and reservoirs in combination with a large proportion of the building stock which is highly sensitive to flood actions. At present date probably more than 100 mln dwellings are located in low lying flood prone areas in India. Most of them have not been designed to resist water and/or used materials that have water resistance. Even after a shallow flood these buildings often collapse and require complete reconstruction. Although the effects of flooding can not be completely eliminated, many practical measures can be taken to reduce flood damage to buildings by improving flood resistance and/or resilience. These measures are generally considered as part of a wider package of flood mitigation measures taken at local level including flood awareness, warning and emergency planning. Of specific relevance in this context is the potential of high volume utilisation of coal fly ash (CFA). CFA may exhibit pozzolanic properties, or self-cementing properties, or both. It can and has been successfully used as part of the binder in stabilized, water resistant base construction applications and bricks, and stabilized flood defence structures such as embankments and dikes. The accumulated CFA production in India was about 100 million tons in the last year which is expected to be raised beyond 150 million tones by the year 2010. Most of the power plants now are facing shortage of dumping space for this waste material. This necessitates effective utilization. The development and customization of these applications have a huge potential to contribute to the mitigation of flood impacts all over India. The Dutch expertise in the field of flood proofing technology and CFA utilisation is well recognized and could be of value in further exploring the technical, economic and environmental potentials of these new applications. A workshop will be held to explore the potentials for an India-Dutch cooperation RTD project directed to assess the need and technical and socio-economic feasibility of these new applications. The workshop will be organized by the Dutch Embassy and UNESCO-IHE and will be held in New Delhi in July 2008. This initiative is in agreement with and a respond to the Indian/Dutch MOU[2] which has been put into action on March 28, 2008

[2]Memorandum of Understanding between the Ministry of Science and Technology of the Republic of India and the Ministry of Economic Affairs of The Netherlands on cooperation in the field of Science, Technology and Innovation, March 28, 2008.