Shumita (Shamita) Basu
speaker
365 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2025
last heard 22 Jan
Shumita (Shamita) Basu’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
The country has endured its driest autumn in 50 years.
Yesterday, some areas went from drought to floods as sudden rainfall fell on parched grounds that weren't able to quickly absorb all the water, causing flash flood conditions in places.
But the crisis remains acute.
Experts have said Iran is now water bankrupt.
Here is Kaveh Madani, the former deputy head of Iran's Department of Environment, explaining this analogy to ABC News Australia.
While drought is the main culprit, other factors have also contributed, like overusage from agriculture.
90% of the country's water use goes to low-yield agriculture to promote self-sufficiency in Iran.
There's also damage to infrastructure from Iran's 12-day war with Israel earlier this year.
And sanctions have prevented Iran from obtaining state-of-the-art water technology.
One Iran analyst, Ali Reza Nader, placed some of the blame on government inaction and poor planning while speaking on Germany's DW News.
Iran's crisis has led officials there to undertake desperate measures, most notably cloud seeding, an unproven technology that involves spraying clouds with chemicals in hopes of producing rain.
Rainfall across Iran this year is down 85 percent below average.
Meanwhile, Tehran, the capital, a city of 10 million people that's about as densely populated as New York City, is staring down the possibility of soon facing day zero.
That's when a municipality can no longer supply drinking water to its residents.
The country's president has argued that the water supply issue is just one of many that make the case for moving Iran's capital from Tehran to a city further south.
And he said if rain doesn't fall in Tehran soon, they might have to consider the monumental work of evacuating the city.
Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following.
President Trump says he does not hold Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, responsible for the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
In an exchange with a reporter in the Oval Office, Trump brushed aside a question about the late journalist, who the CIA concluded was killed on bin Salman's orders.
The reporter was with ABC News, which Trump criticized before going on to address the question this way.
Showing 221–240 of 365 · page 12 of 19
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