-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The flood fury in Assam, Bihar, Bengal and Uttar Pradesh has taken attention away from poor monsoon rains in large parts of the country in August. The month has so far seen a 24% rain deficit (till August 18), with central India in particular reeling under a prolonged break in the monsoon. The lull in rains has opened up a huge 58% shortfall in central India,...

-PTI ‘North central region seeing much wetter pattern, with stronger monsoons over the last 15 years’ Washington: Monsoon has strengthened over north central India in the last 15 years, researchers from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have said, indicating a reversal in the general perception that the region has dried up in over a decade. Chien Wang, a senior research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, the...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Narendra Modi government, which had promised to facilitate the creation of 10 million new jobs each year, can finally boast a direct hand in carving out employment in a season of layoffs and self-inflicted economic wounds. But the jobs are in a sector the Prime Minister had promised to trim: his own administration. The foreign ministry plans to hire 400 computer-literate men and women to help it...

-Deccan Chronicle The slogan was that there would never again be scarcity of food because we can now make “bread from air”. There are two distinct futures of food and farming. One leads to a dead end. A dead planet: poisons and chemical monocultures spreading; farmers committing suicide due to debt for seeds and chemicals; children dying due to lack of food; people dying because of chronic diseases spreading due to nutritionally empty, toxic...

-The Times of India Right on the edge of the Ganga basin that spans 11 Indian states lies Naujhil block, a few kilometres west of the Yamuna in UP's Mathura district. You would think this is a blessed location with plentiful water all round. With its 17 tributaries, including the Yamuna, Ganga's catchment area has about 525 billion cubic metres (bcm) of surface water and about 171 bcm of groundwater. On average,...